Protesting political commencement speakers—presidents past and present, former or current Cabinet members who wax platitudinous on graduation day—is not a new phenomenon. SoVice President Mike Pence knew what he was walking into at Notre Dame last weekend. He came prepared. And while he condemned the censorious habits of mind endemic to campuses these days, students and families filed silently out of their own graduation ceremony.
About 150 up and left, according to the South Bend Tribune, missing the vice president’s praise of the Fighting Irish for their commitment to free speech and liberal-democratic dissent. “While this institution has maintained an atmosphere of civility and open debate,” he said, “far too many campuses across America have become characterized by speech codes, safe zones, tone policing, administration-sanctioned political correctness—all of which amounts to nothing less than suppression of the freedom of speech.”
Students at the nation’s top Catholic university spent weeks planning their Pence protest. The protest, led by the group We StaND For, was not just predictable but preplanned: activists mapped out the venue and their route online ahead of time. Women’s March organizers and representatives from GLAAD—formerly the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation; now, to ward off the appearance of trans-exclusion, “GLAAD” stands for nothing—stepped up to support the scheduled walkout. Alumni signed on by the thousands. Talking Points Memo published passages from the protesters’ manifesto:
Today’s campus protesters control the story. It’s what primarily differentiates them from their hippie progenitors, pioneers in campus unrest who couldn’t count on an endless supply of retweets or an elite national press in step with their efforts.
And, at least in message, Pence pre-empted them: “This university is a vanguard of freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas at a time, sadly, when free speech and civility are waning on campuses across America.” His rhetorical emphasis on civil dissent held students to a higher standard, which the relatively respectful silent protest more or less met. The deeper shame of overshadowing the ceremony with attention-seeking antics and plain old bad manners may come in time to haunt some students’ memories of their graduation. Pence’s praise of Notre Dame just about guarantees it will.
President Obama pulled a similar move in 2009 during his first commencement season, addressing irreconcilable camps divided on the issue of legal and subsidized abortion at none other venue than Notre Dame graduation. “As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate?” he asked graduates to look within, and to “join hands in common effort.” Students wore symbols of the ideological rift on their mortar boards: Crosses and fetus-sized footprints, or the Obama campaign logo. Before the ceremony, police arrested 38 activists demonstrating outside.
Obama’s admonition of a polarized political discourse reflect Pence’s warnings against censorship closely enough to spawn a who-said-what game show from the two Notre Dame addresses.
Who said it, Pence or Obama: “How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?” Hard to tell, isn’t it? How about this one: “Notre Dame is a campus where deliberation is welcomed, where opposing views are debated and where every speaker, no matter how unpopular or unfashionable, is afforded the right to air their views in the open for all to hear.” Actually, that’s too easy. Who but a Republican would defend the “unfashionable” view?
Now here’s a curveball. Who among history’s presidential commencement speakers warned of censorship like so: “Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book—as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.”
It was Dwight D. Eisenhower at Dartmouth in 1953, leveling an extemporaneous salvo at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s slimy paranoia and his aides Roy Cohn and David Schine, who purged libraries across the country. Graduates then and now need to hear it: Our liberty depends on intellectual diversity and vibrant debate. Let it be a debate informed at least in part by a moral sensibility attuned to the variable wrongness of socialists—but let it be a debate.
Eisenhower, in the speech’s less newsmaking moments, instructed the men in “two little lessons”: happiness and courage. “You can live happily if you have courage,” he said, “because you are not fearing something that you can’t help.” This is the sort of messaging commencements were made for, the type of send-off that really ages well. Whenever political bogeymen rise up out of a national anxiety and inspire viral attention-seeking dissent, for instance, we’ll struggle for the courage to stare down genuine threats they distract us from.
Fearing the distant unreality of dystopian theocracy under the remotely possible future President Pence qualifies as “something you can’t help” breeds a noxious inaction and unhappiness, Eisenhower might say. It instills disunity, Obama would advise graduates early in his first term. And willful ignorance permits a dangerously single-minded trend toward autocracy, Pence warned. But no one who needed to hear that message was really listening.
