College commencement remains what it has been for quite some time: an opportunity to impart useless drivel – as articulated by some mediocre celebrity for a hefty honorarium – while excluding conservatives from the dais. Thus the rocker Jon Bon Jovi (Monmouth University) recants the transcendent virtues, valuable to all graduating seniors no doubt, of negotiations within the recording industry; or Bryant Gumbel (Howard University) perpetuates a series of liberal clichés, upon receiving the university's endorsement and a noteworthy photo-op. Yet conservative ideals – that the university is a source of accumulated knowledge, preferably immune from political correctness or multiculturalism – never enter the commencement ceremony.
Instead, higher education treats itself like a brand, constantly tweaking or repackaging elements for popular consumption. So, if Latin is unpopular or Edmund Burke unfashionable . . . presto, chango, Ebonics is now a bona fide language and Naomi Wolfe a contemporary philosopher. The problem, of course, is that higher education is not a form of academic breakfast cereal – whereby ingenious marketers use words like "New and Improved" or "Fifty-percent Stronger" to characterize knowledge. But such instability within the classroom inevitably produces chaos upon graduation.
On a practical level, celebrity commencement speakers, especially liberal ones, simply represent the climax of political correctness within the academy. The speaker is not conveying new or unsavory information; he merely affirms – like the university degree itself – that graduates have absorbed the obligatory series of sensitivity seminars and gender-neutral homilies before entering the workforce. Hence the general lack of outrage when, say, convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal delivers the commencement address (via electronic recording) at Ohio's Antioch College, or Noam Chomsky is the keynote speaker (in 1999) at the University of Connecticut.
That students and parents freely accept such leftist tripe yields a more important yet obscure phenomenon: academia considers conservatism, as well as the handful of "conservative" speakers (insert any nominal Republican politician), as an extremist ideology. Admittedly some conservatives like President George W. Bush (of the so-called "compassionate" variety) receive commencement invitations from national universities, including Notre Dame and Yale. But presidential speaking opportunities are more a product of convention – usually an opportunity to unveil or further articulate new policies – than validation of conservative principles. In Bush's case, his acceptance of an honorary degree from Yale is no sign of academic legitimation, at least deduced by the number of student catcalls and skewed media broadcasts.
Why then the spontaneous outrage when colleges or universities bestow a token speaking opportunity upon a conservative leader, even if columnist George Will is one of the more frequently designated recipients? None of which is to suggest that Will is less desirable as a commencement speaker than the current retinue of liberal extremists. Rather, academe's opinion of Will as a rightist figure – notwithstanding his affiliation with ABC News and the Washington Post – demonstrates the deficit between the academy's misguided political perceptions and the outside world's broader reality, for example.
Still, the overall dearth of conservative commencement speakers is an effect of liberalism's predominance within higher education, not a cause. Or, to characterize the point more clinically, conservatism is the new deviancy among colleges and universities. No, a condemned prisoner is apparently an acceptable commencement speaker – even an aging rock star has some alleged cachet – though a conservative writer or politician remains a pariah. Few students or parents protest these academic customs, though anonymity quickly mutates itself into petitions or placards against even the most marginal conservative individuals. Yet each year the pattern repeats itself: liberal celebrity inveighs against "conservative" America (read: mainstream culture); parents, professors and students applaud; confetti falls.
May 31, 2001
