The campus’s choice for a commencement speaker, announced Thursday, is largely lackluster and builds on a tradition of white men in tech sending off students into the world outside UC Berkeley.

Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, will not necessarily be inspiring to the average student. Though we appreciate his commitment to equality — aiming to pay women and men equivalent salaries for doing the same work and canceling company events in Indiana to protest its “religious freedom” law — he is not the right fit to be our commencement speaker.

The people behind the podium send bigger messages than what comes from their mouths — their positioning in front of an immensely accomplished and talented crowd of soon-to-be graduates signals to the audience that “this is what you should aspire to be when you leave.” Indeed, Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said in a statement, “(Benioff) exemplifies what we at Berkeley hope to instill in our students: the desire to work hard, coupled with the desire to give back and support the greater good.”

But there are plenty of nontech CEOs who work hard and have the desire to support the greater good: academics, poets, scientists, humanitarians. Administrators and the Californians, the student group that assists with finding speakers, just needed to find someone who could speak eloquently, keep students entertained and pass along a few pieces of noncliche life advice. As we’ve editorialized before, alumni are particularly well suited to give the commencement speech: They connect better with students and represent what students themselves can later accomplish with the teaching here.

Moreover, selecting Benioff and other tech leaders as recent commencement speakers sends the message to students that they should value careers with high payoffs and use their positions to support philanthropic endeavors outside their companies. Benioff, for one, notably donated a total of $200 million to the UCSF Children’s Hospital and Children’s Hospital Oakland, which now bear his name. Generating a giant net worth and using a large portion on philanthropy can certainly benefit the greater good, but it’s not necessarily the route UC Berkeley as an institution encourages. Our campus is about public service, activism and academia. And while creating tools such as customer relationship management products is useful for the corporate world, it’s not what the vast majority of students on campus care about or seek to do in their own lives.

In his commencement speech to his alma mater, the University of Southern California, Benioff devoted a good portion of time to PR for his company. We hope he avoids such a move in his address three weeks from now and focuses more on the traditions of UC Berkeley.

Editorials represent the collective opinion of the Senior Editorial Board as written by the opinion editor.