In 1946, Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech, which set the global geopolitical tone for the next 40 years and today is regarded as one of the greatest orations of the 20th century. Churchill’s audience for this speech wasn’t the United Nations or the House of Commons, but the Class of 1946–a group of college seniors at a small college in Missouri near Harry Truman’s hometown. But had the Class of 1946 been like the Class of 2014, Churchill’s famous speech may well have been lost to history.
Last week, 483 Smith College students denied their classmates and families the opportunity to hear from the head of one of the most powerful organizations in the world, continuing a disturbing trend of unaccomplished college students crying petulantly when their school’s commencement speaker holds views that align less than perfectly with their own.
As head of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde is one of the ten most powerful women in the world, but that apparently doesn’t qualify her to speak at the graduation ceremony at a small women’s college in western Massachusetts. A handful of Smith students, offended by the IMF’s supposed “imperialistic” nature, started a petition to remove Lagarde as their commencement speaker–and despite getting less than halfway to their stated signature goal, they succeeded in upholding the impenetrable bubble of same-mindedness surrounding their campus.
This came just days after students at Rutgers forced the highest-ranking woman in American history, Condoleezza Rice, from their campus after sit-in protests that would have made 60’s radicals proud.
Millennials may think that acts of defiance like this demonstrate resilience, intellectual independence, or superior morality, but they don’t understand how shortsighted and narrow-minded these protests really are. If young people can’t tolerate listening to an accomplished person with whom they disagree for 45 minutes, they’re in for a rude awakening in the workplace.
Professional success requires not only talent and hard work, but maturity, and one of the hallmarks of a mature adult is the ability to converse with, and learn from–or at least listen to–people with different points of view.
As the Class of 2014 trades in their caps and gowns for suits and cubicles, they’ll quickly learn that most successful employees devote more time to forging relationships and building bridges than to blacklisting people they find objectionable.
While it’s unlikely that Christine Lagarde or Condoleezza Rice will be showing up at new graduates’ workplaces, many of these noble-minded protesters will be settling into offices with supervisors who hold different political views. They may even have work with clients whose business practices they find objectionable. And in the real world, they won’t simply be able to stamp their feet and make these people disappear. Instead, they’ll have to tolerate philosophical differences–and they may even learn a thing or two in the process.
The fact that we’re even having this conversation constitutes a major failure on the part of American academia. The role of a university–which comes from the Latin word for “whole”–has always been to bring together scholars and students in a place where knowledge can be shared and ideas debated. But instead of fostering this culture of tolerant, open-minded thinking, too many colleges and universities are turning out graduates who refuse to consider any perspective other than their own.
