It is hardly a surprise that administrators and faculty members pick liberal figures exclusively after purging faculty ranks of virtually all conservative and libertarian professors. Despite years of criticism from donors and commentators in the academic echo chamber, these schools show no interest in offering ideological diversity in hiring or at commencements.
Raskin just called for radical changes to the Supreme Court after declaring it “gerrymandered” because he disagrees with its decision on racial gerrymandering. Most Americans find such changes, including court packing, to be reckless and dangerous. Yet, not one but two colleges insisted that graduates who want to attend the ceremony must listen to Raskin.
Talarico is a candidate in a hotly contested political race. Yet, Paul Quinn College insisted on turning the graduation into a campaign event for Talarico, who made many of the same points he made on the campaign trail.
It is hardly surprising that Pelosi used her speech to lash out at Trump and the GOP for destroying democracy. If you are a conservative or Republican, the college expects you to sit there and obediently listen to the diatribe.
I have served as a commencement speaker, and I would never use the speeches to advance political interests. However, I was the target of such a speech. My law school invited one of the most partisan members on the Hill, Susan Wild, who was later defeated.
In a speech to the law students on living an ethical life as a lawyer, Wild accused me of testifying falsely in the Trump impeachment that only criminal acts are impeachable after saying the opposite in my testimony in the Clinton impeachment.
The only problem is that Wild’s statement was demonstrably and undeniably false. I testified in both the Clinton and Trump impeachments that an impeachable offense need not be an actual crime. Wild’s own Democratic colleagues and later the House managers in the Senate Trump trial repeatedly cited my testimony on that very point.
Ironically, before leaving Congress, Wild was accused of unethical conduct in leaking a non-public report against another colleague. At the time, the Hill reported that Wild “was absent from the panel’s meeting last week after being traced as the source of leaks to the press regarding the investigation.”
It is hardly difficult to get speakers who can appeal to both liberals and conservatives in a student body. The problem is not the supply but the demand. Faculty members and administrators want to use commencements as a final opportunity for indoctrination, including inviting a liberal candidate for the Senate to give a campaign speech. It treats its students and their families as a captive audience.
Despite years of criticism over the overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic identity of commencement speakers, faculty are entirely unrepentant. They do it because they can. They continue to use their institutions to advance their own ideological and political interests. Commencements are merely the culmination of that unrelenting approach.
The issue remains whether donors (and legislators for state schools) will draw the line and withhold their support until they see real, not just rhetorical, commitments to intellectual diversity.
For students who must listen to these figures denounce their values or interests, remember this feeling. It is the final lesson on the state of our higher education. The lesson should not be to fight to flip the ideological bias, but to show the integrity and civility that your schools lack. You should no more want your liberal classmates to listen to a conservative diatribe than you would have to listen to a liberal diatribe. Your professors are leaving you with a powerful experience of how power can be abused. You can aspire to something greater in working to restore respect and balance to higher education.