Every spring, thousands of American higher learning institutions and tens of thousands of high schools send their graduates off with a commencement ceremony. A centerpiece of the event, as old as American education itself, is the commencement speech. At their best, these speeches furnish students with wise and inspiring advice for the future. The choice of speaker is also part of the message; it signals the sort of person of whom the university, college, or high school approves.
[img nocaption float=”left” width=”212″ height=”321″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]24836[/img]Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and the tenth richest person in the country, was Harvard University’s choice in 2014. The selection was not entirely disinterested. Bloomberg, a Harvard MBA, is perhaps the largest single educational philanthropist in the country. In the past he had donated $350 million to Harvard (and more than a billion to his undergraduate alma mater, Johns Hopkins). Who knew what flights of largesse might be inspired by an invitation to deliver Harvard’s 63rd commencement speech?
But just being rich isn’t sufficient for a commencement honor by Harvard or other elite, liberal universities. You must also be politically and culturally simpatico. Bloomberg seemed perfect. A political independent, he supported Barack Obama in 2012, as did virtually everyone at Harvard. He is a leader in progressive social issues such as gun control, immigration reform, climate change, abortion rights, and gay marriage.
The Harvard committee that chose Bloomberg had every reason to expect a warm, congratulatory address to the graduates. But commencement had a different meaning for Bloomberg. He took it as an occasion to accuse the nation’s most liberal universities, including his host, of betraying their deepest notional value: tolerance.
“There is an idea floating around college campuses— including here at Harvard—that scholars should be funded only if their work conforms to a particular view of justice,” he said. “There’s a word for that idea: censorship. And it is just a modern-day form of McCarthyism.” Bloomberg cited data from the Federal Election Commission showing that 96 per- cent of Ivy League faculty and administrators who gave money to a presidential candidate in 2012 donated to Barack Obama. “There was more disagreement than that among the members of the old Soviet Politburo,” he said, adding that “a university cannot be great if its faculty is politically homogenous.”
As exhibit A of this campus intolerance, Bloomberg offered the current commencement season. Just a few weeks earlier, Brandeis University had disinvited human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali from delivering a graduation speech. A Somali Muslim who has lived much of her adult life under death threats because of her critique of Islam’s treatment of women and gays, Hirsi Ali seemed a perfect speaker for the liberal university— until a cadre of Muslim activists and radical faculty denounced her. Instead of supporting Hirsi Ali’s right to speak, the president of Brandeis caved to the pressure and told her she wouldn’t be welcome at commencement due to “certain of her past statements” that were, in his view, inconsistent with the university’s “core values.” He didn’t elaborate on what those values were, but they clearly didn’t include intellectual diversity. Compounding the insult, he had the audacity to invite Hirsi Ali to visit the school someday for a discussion “in the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University through its history.” Presumably, such a discussion would be vetted first by the Muslim students and radical professors whose protests had made Hirsi Ali persona non grata.
Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was invited to give the commencement speech at Rutgers University that spring. Rice, like Hirsi Ali, is a distinguished woman of color who overcame childhood discrimination and bigotry to rise to international prominence.
As Secretary Rice prepared her remarks, campus activists mobilized to keep her off the podium. The leaders of Rutgers’s Muslim organizations sent a letter to the school’s president, accusing Rice of “grave human rights violations,” and denounced her publicly as a “war criminal.” Rice had helped lead American wars against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Muslims had died in these wars. This, the protesters asserted, gave them the right to veto Rice’s appearance (a precedent, given America’s generational struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, that would disqualify senior members of the Obama team and every foreseeable administration). The students also staged demonstrations, occupying a campus building and frightening the school’s administration. Rutgers was obviously relieved when Rice, disinclined to face such hostility, offered to cancel. The school’s administration made no attempt to dissuade her.
A trend seemed to be developing. Students at Haverford College, an elite Quaker school near Philadelphia, forced the withdrawal of scheduled commencement speaker Robert Birgneau, former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. His crime was calling the cops when Occupy demonstrators set up tents on campus. At Smith College, an elite Massachusetts women’s school, a petition was circulated against Christine Lagarde’s appearance at commencement. Lagarde, the first female managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was accused of heading an organization that promoted “imperialist and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide,” and of failing to stand “in unity with equality for all women regardless of race, ethnicity or class.” Five hundred students and faculty signed the petition, a very considerable number on a campus of three thousand. Lagarde did the math and bowed out. She was replaced by Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College and an Obama appointee to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.
Bloomberg pointed to these and other recent silencings, such as those of former undersecretary of state Robert Zoellick at Swarthmore and Dr. Benjamin Carson at Johns Hopkins. “In each case liberals silenced a voice—and denied an honorary degree—to individuals they deemed politically objectionable,” he said. It was especially outrageous, he added, because these incidents of censorship of dissenting views had taken place at elite schools in the Northeast, “a bastion of self-professed liberal tolerance.”
The silencing of invited commencement speakers made news because it was so blatant. But, in fact, commencement speakers at elite universities are almost always right-thinking liberals. In the wake of the recent epidemic of disinvitation, Harry Enten of the Web site FiveThirtyEight took a look at the roster of commencement speakers in the last two years at the nation’s top thirty universities and top thirty liberal arts colleges, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Enten found twenty-five current or past Democratic officeholders and zero for Republicans. (There were two former Republican officeholders, Bloomberg and Chuck Hagel, Obama’s former secretary of defense.)
Ostensibly nonpolitical speakers but indubitably liberal cultural figures were also heard on commencement day at elite in- stitutions. They included thought leaders such as New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick, Oprah Winfrey, authors Toni Morrison, Walter Isaacson, and Rita Dove, tennis star and feminist icon Billie Jean King, media mogul Arianna Huffington, NPR host Terry Gross, ex–New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, and singer-activist John Legend. Theonly obvious political or cultural conservative in the past two years was Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who spoke at Notre Dame. The rest of the orators were celebrities, scientists, scholars, and philanthropists. They weren’t ideologically identifiable, but it is a fair guess that none had committed crimes against bien-pensant doctrine. We would have certainly heard.
It would be hard to argue that irreparable harm has been done to the graduates exposed to a doctrinal orthodoxy on commencement day. They are, after all, finished products of a liberal education, marinated for four years in academic and social sauce prepared from politically correct ingredients. Those who came to campus as liberals are very likely leaving the same way. Some who arrived as conservatives have seen the light. It is unlikely that the graduates will be lastingly edified by the parting thoughts of Arianna Huffington, John Kerry, or Billie Jean King.
What these elite students lose—throughout their education and, most visibly, on graduation day—is an opportunity to hear speakers who will challenge the conventional wisdom and en- courage them to consider the possibility that all the smart, cool, talented, and virtuous role models in the country happen to be mirror images of themselves. This reinforces the self-gratifying notion that the leadership class is blessed with a monopoly on wisdom and talent. This delusion has had lamentable repercussions since the Kennedy administration’s “best and brightest” led the country into Vietnam, and it is alive and on display in the persistent pratfalls of the Obama administration.
There is a wide spectrum of conservative thinking in this collection. My purpose is not to develop a right-wing orthodoxy,but precisely to show the intellectual and cultural nuance on that side of the spectrum. And so you find Ben Carson who opposes gay marriage and Ted Olson who advocated for it in California; Bobby Jindal, a devout evangelical, and George Will, a self-described “amiable, low wattage atheist.” There are blue state Republicans and red; libertarians and Tea Partiers; fiscal conservatives and big spenders.
Some of the contributors would not call themselves conservatives. But their views—on American exceptionalism, religious traditionalism, party affiliation, foreign affairs, or constitutional government—place them in that camp. They would not all agree with one another on any particular issue. Nor do I. I have included even those with whom I disagree in this anthology for the same reason that elite schools need to include conservatives on their commencement day platforms: because it is literally impossible to maintain an open society without hearing and understanding the other side.
Most of the speeches (or columns, in some cases) in this volume are not explicitly political or programmatic. They were meant to enlighten and inspire. It is my hope that gathering them in a single volume will enlighten liberals by exposing them to new and unconventional thoughts; and will inspire conservatives— especially young conservatives—with the realization that there are plenty of brilliant, talented, and eminent men and women who share their views and who speak to, and for, them.
Excerpted from Remembering Who We Are: A Treasury of Conservative Commencement Addresses edited by Zev Chafets, in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Zev Chafets, 2015.
