It’s graduation season again, which means it’s time for the usual round of news stories about controversial graduation speakers and the attempts by protesters to get them disinvited. For example, after protesters at Rutgers got Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to back out of giving the commencement address, the normally wonderfully cynical P. J. O’Rourke went into full curmudgeon mode complaining about the kids these days and extolling Rice’s experience:
…she also served, from 1989 to 1991, as the Soviet expert on the White House National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush.
1989 happens to be when the Berlin Wall fell. I know, I know, most of you weren’t born, and you get your news from TMZ. A wall falling over can’t be as interesting as Beyonce’s sister punching and kicking Jay Z in a New York hotel elevator. But that 1989 moment of “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (and I’ll bet you a personal karaoke performance of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” that you can’t name the poet who wrote it) had interesting consequences. Stop taking selfies and Google “Berlin Wall” on the iPhones you’re all fiddling with.
Condoleezza Rice was named National Security Adviser in December 2000, less than a year before some horrific events that you may know of. She became Secretary of State in 2005 during an intensely difficult period in American history (which your teach-in was not going to teach you much about). And she saw the job through to the end of the fraught and divisive George W. Bush presidency, making moral and ethical decisions of such a complex and contradictory nature that they would have baffled Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (of whom I suppose, perhaps naively, you have heard) put together.
You know what? Nobody gives a shit what Condoleeza Rice would have said at the Rutgers graduation ceremony. You know why? Because it was graduation day. All the exams have been taken, all the grades have been submitted. This material will not be on the test.
(O’Rourke goes on to make fun of Rutgers for being the 69th best-rated university according to U.S. News & World Report — so you know it must be true — and makes fun of a professor named Bell by nicknaming him “Jingle,” thus showing why he gets paid the big bucks while I toil here for free.)
Another of these articles comes from Stephen L. Carter, who has a sneering attack on oversensitive protesters in BloombergView:
In my day, the college campus was a place that celebrated the diversity of ideas. Pure argument was our guide. Staking out an unpopular position was admired — and the admiration, in turn, provided excellent training in the virtues of tolerance on the one hand and, on the other, integrity.
Your generation, I am pleased to say, seems to be doing away with all that. There’s no need for the ritual give and take of serious argument when, in your early 20s, you already know the answers to all questions. How marvelous it must be to realize at so tender an age that you will never, ever change your mind, because you will never, ever encounter disagreement! How I wish I’d had your confidence and fortitude. I could have spared myself many hours of patient reflection and intellectual struggle over the great issues of the day.
Look, if you’re arguing whether they’re right or wrong to protest, then your reflexive defense of free speech is missing the point. It’s just not the right occasion for controversial speakers and the “ritual give and take of serious argument.” I’m all for debate and new ideas, but by graduation day, you’ve kind of missed the window.
(And how is that argument supposed to take place, exactly? It’s been a while since I graduated, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a Q & A session.)
When students at Smith College protested a scheduled commencement address by Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, she graciously withdrew from the event as college President Kathleen McCartney explains:
I regret to inform you that Christine Lagarde has withdrawn as Smith’s 2014 commencement speaker in the wake of anti-IMF protests from faculty and students, including a few who wrote directly to her. She conveyed to me this weekend that she does not want her presence to detract from the occasion.
“In the last few days,” she wrote, “it has become evident that a number of students and faculty members would not welcome me as a commencement speaker. I respect their views, and I understand the vital importance of academic freedom. However, to preserve the celebratory spirit of commencement day, I believe it is best to withdraw my participation.”
Lagarde understands what the people who scheduled her did not: Students have been working long and hard to get to that ceremony, and it’s supposed to be about them.
On the day I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree, my parents drove down to see me. Neither of them had been to college, so they were proud that they had been able to send me, and I was grateful for their support and encouragement. I was also pretty proud of myself. I had done well and earned a Bachelor of Science degree with High Honors, which at that point in my life was one of the most difficult things I had ever done. I remember showing them around the campus, talking about where I lived and where I did all my studying. They had brought along some friends of mine, and afterwards we went out to dinner at a nice restaurant.
Those are my memories of of graduation, and I think I can safely assume that many of my friends have similar memories. And I’ll bet few of us can remember what the guest speaker said. But thank God that whoever planned the ceremony didn’t bring in some controversial lightning rod of a speaker. Our commencement address was given by physicist Leon Lederman. I think he said something about education.
(Dr. Lederman won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the method he and two other physicists used to discover the muon neutrino. He was also the director of Fermilab for ten years. He was one of the biggest advocates of searching for the Higgs boson and he wrote the most well-known book about it, The God Particle. By reading that book, or some textbooks on particle physics, or really even the Wikipedia article on neutrinos or the Higgs boson, you can learn much more about the real important work of Leon Lederman than anybody learned from his commencement address.)
Meanwhile, Stephen Carter had something to say about the Rutgers situation as well:
Then there are your fellows at Rutgers University, who rose up to force the estimable Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national security adviser, to withdraw. The protest was worded with unusual care, citing the war in Iraq and the “torture” practiced by the Central Intelligence Agency. Cleverly omitted was the drone war. This elision allows the protesters to wish away the massive drone war that President Barack Obama’s administration has conducted now for more than five years, with significant loss of innocent life. As for the Iraq war, well, among its early and enthusiastic supporters was — to take a name at random — then-Senator Hillary Clinton. But don’t worry. Consistency in protest requires careful and reflective thought, and that is exactly what we should be avoiding here.
This just proves my point. You invite someone like Condoleeza Rice, and next thing you know, the political pundits like Carter are insulting your community and somehow linking your graduation ceremony to an attack on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
It gets worse. After Haverford College students protested against former University of California (Berkeley) chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, leading to his withdrawal, his replacement speaker decided to make a stink about it:
William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton and a nationally respected higher education leader, called the student protesters’ approach both “immature” and “arrogant” and the subsequent withdrawal of Robert J. Birgeneau, former chancellor of the University of California Berkeley, a “defeat” for the Quaker college and its ideals.
So he insulted the Haverford and its students, and it made the newspapers. Awesome job, whoever planned the ceremony. Are you happy with what you’ve done to your graduation this year? Is this what you wanted?
Also, as with O’Rourke, Bowen seems not to understand how commencement works:
“I am disappointed that those who wanted to criticize Birgeneau’s handling of events at Berkeley chose to send him such an intemperate list of “demands,” said Bowen, who led Princeton from 1972 to 1988 and last year received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. “In my view, they should have encouraged him to come and engage in a genuine discussion, not to come, tail between his legs, to respond to an indictment that a self-chosen jury had reached without hearing counter-arguments.”
Yeah, no question, sending lists of demands is a douchebag thing to do. But how the hell does Bowen think they’re going to “engage in a genuine discussion” during the commencement speech? Does he even hear what he’s saying?
In her letter to the Smith community, President McCartney doesn’t do any better:
I want to underscore this fact: An invitation to speak at a commencement is not an endorsement of all views or policies of an individual or the institution she or he leads. Such a test would preclude virtually anyone in public office or position of influence. Moreover, such a test would seem anathema to our core values of free thought and diversity of opinion. I remain committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect.
Again, “debated”? On graduation day? This is feel-good nonsense. It’s an admirable defense of free speech principals, but if your graduation ceremony has become the subject of a rancorous debate, you’ve kind of already ruined it.
I understand the point McCartney is trying to make. It’s okay to object to speech you don’t like, and it’s okay to speak out and protest against it. But it’s not okay to silence speech you don’t like, and it’s not okay to deprive other people of their right to hear speech you don’t like. Everybody say it with me: The best remedy for bad speech is good speech.
Many colleges and universities are run by people who feel it’s their role to challenge students’ preconceptions and present them with a wide range of viewpoints and opinions. I think those are perfectly valid values for an institution of higher education. It makes a lot of sense to schedule speakers who are unorthodox, who represent unpopular ideas, and who make people uncomfortable.
(Although, if I seem less than completely enthusiastic, it’s because I am annoyed by the amount of importance placed on non-curricular stuff like this. I suppose plenty of people go to college to “have experiences” and “encounter other ways of being” or whatever. But I went to school to learn shit. My degree was in Computer Science, and I spent all my time learning algorithms and data structures and the discrete mathematical structures that underlie so much of computing. I learned computer graphics and databases and operating systems. I spent long hours learning computer architecture and the deep mysteries of compilers, and as hard as some of it was, it was also absolutely fascinating. If you’re really interested in the subjects you’re studying, there are worlds to explore.)
So if you want college to present students with controversial speakers, I’m all for it, and to hell with what a bunch of whiny protesters say. But can we please stop pretending that the graduation ceremony is a crucial moment in students’ education? You’ve had four long years to mold their minds and shape their way of understanding the world. You’ve had plenty of time for all the challenging speakers — or better yet, challenging classes — you could possibly want. If you haven’t done the job right by graduation day, it’s too late.
And if you have done the job right, what’s the point of having a controversial speaker? What more good could it possibly do? The students have done everything you’ve asked for four years and now they just want to celebrate with their friends and families. After all they’ve been through to get there, making many of them sit and listen to someone you know they’ll find offensive is kind of a dick move.
(By the way, you may notice something missing from all these articles complaining about protests against commencement speakers: Quotations. Condoleeza Rice, for example, has about a dozen honorary doctorate degrees, so you know she’s given commencement addresses before, yet for all that P. J. O’Rourke extolls her virtues and accomplishments, he never quite gets around to giving any examples of the awesome things she’s said at any of her other speeches.)
Finally, if there are protests, and your speaker backs down, it’s only going to draw the kind of ugly media attention that Haverford, Smith, and Rutgers have been getting. All you will have accomplished is making your college look stupid and marring the day for your graduating students. Again, it’s wrong that the protesters are able prevent someone from being heard. But it was a predictable consequence that could have been avoided if you had kept the students in mind and chosen a speaker who would complement the occasion instead of dominating it.
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