New York Times columnist Timothy Egan (5/16/14) rages against the “forces of intolerance,” “bigots,” “censors” and “lefty thought police”—that is, against college students who dare to have moral objections to the speakers their administrations chose to garnish their graduations with.
His lead example is Condoleezza Rice, who withdrew as Rutgers University’s commencement speaker after some students objected. See if you can follow Egan’s moral logic:
The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush—two wars on the credit card, making torture a word associated with the United States—was clearly a debacle. Contemporary assessments were not kind, and history will be brutal.
But if every speaker has to pass a test for benign mediocrity and politically correct sensitivity, commencement stages will be home to nothing but milquetoasts. You want torture? Try listening to the Stanford speech of 2009, when Justice Anthony M. Kennedy gave an interminable address on the intricacies of international law, under a broiling sun, with almost no mention of the graduates.
As Egan acknowledges, this is a person who helped start wars—wars that killed hundreds of thousands of human beings. She authorized torture, which is an international crime. But apparently most public figures are guilty of similar atrocities, because excluding people like her would leave you only with “benign mediocrity” and “nothing but milquetoasts.”
Immediately after citing the actual torture that Rice was actually responsible for, Egan makes a joke about a boring speech being the real “torture.” This in service to his no-kidding argument that a boring speech is worse than a criminal speaker. It’s really kind of sociopathic.
It needs to be pointed out that a graduation is not the PBS NewsHour; it’s a celebration of students’ accomplishments. If they feel that honoring a war criminal is an inappropriate way to mark their milestone, they have every right to say so.
Eric
We should sympathize with university chancellors: it’s hard to find a name U.S. politician or administrator who isn’t tarred with war or environmental crimes.
Why would a prestige- and money-sucking college honour people who champion justice and responsibility? They’re not rich and powerful.
Padremellyrn
We should sympathize with university chancellors:
I find it hard to sympathize with folks who are continuously putting their boot in the face of Humanity. As Jim Highttower used to Opine, ‘The higher the monkey climbs the ladder, the more you see the ugly side’
Ado Annie
“. . .some students objected.”
Many students and faculty objected to Ms Rice as a commencement speaker.
Silver Fox
How stupid is Egan?
Gregory Lowrey
I was pleasantly surprised to find your closing statement. Maybe I read wrong but it seemed opposite to the general prior tone.
I don’t think a celebrity is necessary to commend and inspire graduates.
Why parade criminals before them, essentially as their final (school) mentors!
If they were going to be honest, contrite and inspiring graduates to defend integrity and not follow the miserable, misbegotten juvenile and culturally irresponsible and for some at times even treasonous things they did to get their celebrity – then their appearance might have value.
No one should be paid for a graduation address and no-one should get an honorary degree just for showing up and having celebrity!
A degree what is being celebrated after all should have more value than to toss them out as party -favors to criminals and actors!
Irony?
I bet there are plenty of honest, inspiring people right in each community that would be thrilled to commend those graduates for free.
AND… they would be real people night from the community who had used their educations in commendable ways.
Is the graduation somehow of less value if you don’t have a”superstar” at the commencement?
I think it degrades it!
Doug Latimer
A shame Curtis LeMay’s dead … innit, Tim?
Telo
Just two more highly questionable commencement speakers this year include the purported anti-bias Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman for Suffolk University’s Law School and U.S. Sec’y of State and war criminal John Kerry for Boston College. In spite of vocal student disapproval over the administrations’ choices, mainstream media outlets insist on presenting the issue as if those who protest are somehow obsessives, eccentrics and/or nominal fringe groups.
Doug Latimer
And Jack D. Ripper is a fictional character, sadly.
Glenn
Well for sure.
Remember all the commencement speeches made by Adolf Eichmann?
Me neither.
Frank Sellers
Biggus Dickus
Bob Walton
So is the selected graduation speaker a homeophobic fascist, gay left activist, Jihadist, Christian missionary, torturer. war criminal or just someone who has otherwise offended your tender sensibilities? Fuhgediboudit. Your’re not there to honor each other; you’re there to better know your enemy. Shut up and listen (you don’t have to applaud) or walk out less informed of what it is you detest. Either way, your neighbor in the seat next you paid tuition too and didn’t come to hear you.
michael e
I do see the point I suppose.That untried,unconvicted,people who have only been “accused”- by the opposition should be presumed guilty and never be heard from again on our campuses of higher learning.Yes I do see the lefts point.I suppose.More interesting to me is that the protest was run by several teachers and a very small amount of students.The teachers all of which would be considered by most to be very far left.No no nothing wrong here.Nothing to see.Move along move along.Can you imagine the pantheon of those on the left who will be now stopped from ever speaking at our colleges.I mean if anyone on the right steps up to hurl charges at them.Yes yes we really have come so far.Political correctness as seen through the eyes of the left.So sad.Today we have conservatives who must decide if they want to run for office.They must decide if they want to put their families through personal attack on each and every one of them.Yet about Obamas children …I hear not a word.”Condy” showed class and stepped down.I hope all left leaning speakers(Mrs Biden) will do the same.Then we can truly shut down all discourse.Ah how nice it is to be on the left
Charles Barnard
Given that over 400 persons wanted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and war profiteering are employed at the highest levels of our government–none of whom have shown any inclination towards appearing in the World Court to clear themselves, finding an innocent speaker might require stepping down to someone of lesser importance.
Of course, if you want someone who is honest as well…talk with the janitor.
Jessica
“…it is not PBS news hour…” Zing!
Ed
Gregory Lowrey–you absolutely nailed it.
michael e–you are talking out of your ass
Mr. Egan sounds as it he must be part of Karl Rove’s propaganda committee, trying to frame the discussion to make the war criminals and corporate thieves look benign, instead of the human monsters they really are.
I applaud the protesters for rejecting the liars and their dominionist crap. The protesters are paying attention to what is going on in the world, and recent history. They know what’s up, not like the ostriches the right wing propaganda artists want us all to be.
If you want commencement speakers worthy of our children and our country’s future, follow Mr. Lowrey’s suggestions.
Barbara Mullin
Timothy Egan a reporter with a very small brain, a good example of an ugly American writing for the so-called paper of record.
Bruce
And may they graduate to ARRESTING AND PUNISHING WAR CRIMINALS< HENCEFORTH!
Charles Daisy
So Jim – you’re all for censorship, just like all the other liberals out there who claim to be just the opposite. Just come out at say it that you are all for suppression of any speech with which you disagree. This is simply another example of the hypocrisy of the left – you and your fellow travelers are constantly harping on tolerance, but you don’t really mean it. The problem you have here is that, if leftists like you really came clean with the American public, then you would have absolutely no standing in the court of public opinion.
Tobysgirl
The free speech argument above is absurd. Who has ever denied anyone from the Bush or Obama administrations the right to speak? I have to turn off my radio and television on a regular basis so I don’t have to listen to their garbage, and that is not a denial of free speech, it’s my right to refuse to swallow pollution.
Padremellyrn
So Jim – you’re all for censorship, just like all the other liberals out there who claim to be just the opposite. -Charles
Excuse me!? When did getting paid for a invitation to speak as a College Commencement speaker become ‘Free Speech’? By any definition that is not free speech, The problem is the Tealiban Party has never understood the Constitution that it supposedly loves and wants to defend. Free Speech is that which is spoken openly, to the public, at no cost in our daily life. Not “being paid as in invitee to closed ceremony”. And the Chancellors do this all the time, they decide who to invite and who not to invite, based on their own political views and biases.
So sorry, your just having cat fit because someone beloved in your upside down world of pretend conservatism didn’t get their way… Boo hoo.
Jim Naureckas
My general position is that when you’re a guest at a commencement, you’re being given an honor on behalf of the graduating class, and it is completely OK for the graduates to decide they don’t think you’re worthy of the honor. It’s no more about taking away their right to speak than a losing presidential candidate is being censored when they don’t get to give an inauguration speech.
In the specific case of Condoleezza Rice, it’s on the public record that she authorized torture. By my moral compass, torturers are in the same category as rapists and child molesters; I have no trouble understanding why the Rutgers students were appalled by the idea of having her as a speaker.
Dan Stewart
It’s unlikely Tim Egan would lend his polite attention to a commencement speech by Osama Bin Laden. He obviously sees a world of difference between OBL and Rice. Fine…those are his values.
However, many people see the world, and Rice, much differently. In Rice, they see a person that was a leading member of a team of war criminals who enthusiastically (and occasionally jokingly) perpetrated crimes that would make al Qaeda squirm. Killing, maiming, torturing and wreaking unimaginable suffering on hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings is not something many people’s ethics allow them to excuse as a mere mistake.
Rice et al are war criminals by any reasonable definition of the term. Egan’s column said more about his own ethics and morality than it did about those who rightfully objected to polite accommodation of Ms. Rice
Kevin Bradshaw
Mr. Naureckas,
You have a sense of morality which I can really appreciate. Why is an action committed on behalf of the state, or for purposes of state, morally different than actions committed by individual people? There certainly isn’t any logical distinction that I can think of. If we apply the same moral judgments that we apply to individual persons who commit murder, rape, or torture etc. to the actions of the most powerful members of the state, we would, if we care about logical consistency and moral honesty, conclude that the behavior of the powerful has been pathological. And as you know, not applying the same standards of moral conduct to American leaders (the same goes for leaders of state as well as business of course) is a guiding tacit principle of corporate media.