New School President Bob Kerrey recently praised a group of student protesters, comparing them to the students in Tiananmen Square. Was he referring to the Belarussian students who risked police beatings and frostbite to protest a corrupt election? Or the Iranians who risked arrest and torture to protest the rule of the mullahs?
No. He was proud of his own students, who had heckled Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., as he delivered their commencement address. In Kerrey’s mind, heckling McCain in a college surrounded by professors and students who agree with you is comparable to facing a tank or torture. Though admitting that he and McCain felt insulted by the students’ disrespect, he went on to praise the students for the self-restraint they showed in not shutting down the entire ceremony.
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Clearly, it doesn’t take much to earn respect these days. But these students can congratulate themselves on “speaking truth to power.” The rest of us can wonder why it is suddenly noble to reject even listening to someone with whom you disagree and why a university president — and former United States senator — would encourage them in their self-important rudeness.
The New School protesters, and their fellow students who protested Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s speech at Boston College, believe that they don’t need to listen respectfully to someone if they disagree with that person on other issues. The New School students disagree with McCain’s position on the war and that was enough for them to ignore all the issues on which they probably agree.
Those disagreements were enough for them to jeer at a man who survived four-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, refusing early release because his fellow POWs would have been left behind. For that display of honor and courage, McCain deserved the students’ respect. But their disdain for the war outweighed everything else.
McCain spoke eloquently about the importance of healthy debate while maintaining respect for those with whom we argue. “We have so much more that unites us than divides us,” he said. “We need only to look to the enemy who now confronts us, and the benighted ideals to which Islamic extremists pledge allegiance — their disdain for the rights of Man, their contempt for innocent human life — to appreciate how much unites us.” The protesting students would have benefited from hearing and pondering that message. Instead, their turned backs indicated that they didn’t want to be reminded of what unites us. What divides us outweighs every other consideration.
Enter the words “protest” and “commencement address” into Google News, and you’ll find no comparable stories about students rudely protesting liberal commencement speakers. Most of the stories are about students protesting Republican speakers. Somehow, liberal speakers don’t seem to generate protests. Perhaps the liberal students just haven’t had as much practice in swallowing their resentment listening to someone with whom they disagree.
Though some conservatives get invited to give graduation speeches, liberal politicians, celebrities and media figures predominate. The Young America’s Foundation has documented for 13 years the commencement speakers at the U.S. News and World Report’s top 100 colleges, and found that liberal speakers outnumber conservatives by at least two to one. Diversity of thought is seemingly not that important when it comes to commencement speeches.
Why have a commencement speaker at all? University commencement addresses have become a contest of one-upsmanship as schools compete for “name” speakers much the way Leno and Letterman compete for guests. Schools pay tens of thousands of dollars for celebrities to give 20-minute addresses.
Or they award honorary degrees to entice politicians to speak to the graduates. Last year, students at Rice University were disappointed to hear a professor speak rather than a former president or a celebrity as past graduating classes had enjoyed. Who spoke wasn’t as important as having the bragging rights to a famous name.
I doubt that many people remember the speech from their own graduations an hour later, much less years later. We can’t all hear George Marshall announce a world-changing policy at our commencement, as students at Harvard University did in 1947.
Let the colleges save their money and end the controversies by disarming in the battle of celebrity speakers. If the students haven’t heard enough words of wisdom in their four years on campus, then importing a celebrity for one last bit of platitudinous advice isn’t going to send them out into the world any wiser.
Betsy Newmark is proprietor of Betsy’s Page.
