(published in March 2014)
With springtime comes an annual ritual. Universities compete for high-quality high-profile speakers for their upcoming commencement ceremonies. Negotiations are made, invitations are issued, announcements are made, and faculty-student protests of the commencement plans commence. Like the annual nativity scene war, it’s become a tradition.
Sometimes the invited speaker does not fit the political mold of the always liberal faculty organization and their like-minded disciples among the student body. Then the university administration is in for a fight. Time was, university campuses were bastions of free thought---the marketplace, as the saying goes, for the free and open exchange of ideas. Diversity of opinion was valued in academia. No longer.
Conservative speakers on campus are un-invited, heckled, shouted down, pied, or otherwise silenced. Examples include political strategist Karl Rove, Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, author and lecturer David Horowitz, Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes and, of course, author and commentator Ann Coulter. Under the false flag of free speech, the protestors are actually silencing the speech of others.
The current battleground (although it certainly won’t be the only one this year) is Rutgers University’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice. In addition to the commencement speech, the invitation includes bestowal of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. The Faculty Council has called upon the university’s board of governors to rescind their unanimous invitation.
Rice has a pretty hefty curriculum vitae. To be brief: She earned a bachelor’s degree cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Denver, a masters from Notre Dame University, and a doctorate from the University of Denver. She is the author of numerous books. She is a professor at Stanford University and was its provost for six years. She served on the staffs of the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the Bush administration, she served as National Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State. She co-founded an after-school academic enrichment program for students in East Palo Alto, which has now expanded to Atlanta, Birmingham, and Dallas. She has founded a consulting firm. She serves on numerous boards and has received honors and awards too numerous to mention. And by-the-way, she is a pianist accomplished enough to have played with the Denver Symphony, and has performed for Queen Elizabeth II, and with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and singer Aretha Franklin.
The Rutgers faculty group’s opposition to Rice is that she was a supporter of the Iraq war and had contended that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. She was joined in this by 77 members of the U.S. Senate, including Senators Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry. This view was held by our Central Intelligence Agency and shared by the intelligence services of most other nations. But the faculty group has branded her a liar for adhering to this widely held but incorrect position.
So who would be acceptable to the current-day faculty groups in our nation’s universities? Probably not a conservative, no matter how well credentialed.
A few years ago Washington’s Evergreen State College and Ohio’s Antioch College each invited Wesley Cook as their commencement speaker. Cook couldn’t attend the ceremonies, but was kind enough to deliver his remarks by video tape, to inspire the graduates as they passed this important milestone.
The reason Cook, who now goes by the name Mumia Abu-Jamal, could not appear in person is that he is serving a life sentence in prison for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer. Mumia (as is called by his followers) was wounded and apprehended at the scene of the murder. He was convicted by a racially mixed jury on the strength of separate eyewitness accounts, and his conviction has withstood some 30 years of appeals.
Articulate and charismatic, Mumia has styled himself a “political prisoner.” He is popular among Hollywood celebrities, university faculty, and some students---America’s most gullible groups. “Free Mumia” tee shirts evoke nostalgic memories of Che Guevara. Alas, Mumia is not available for a personal appearance. But the Rutgers faculty might consider his video taped commencement address as a substitute if they manage to bully the university administration into canceling its invitation to Condoleezza Rice.
They’ll deserve him.
