Lost in cacaphony: 'Jane Addams' college' has failed as commencement audience shouts down reporter's words on reality of war

National Catholic Reporter, June 6, 2003 by Raymond A. Schroth

Just when The New York Times seems, by its own admission, caught in a moment of embarrassment over its prevaricating reporter, one of its other reporters has received an honor the Times is either too humble or too nervous to acknowledge.

We've read about it in the tabloids and on the Internet, and heard the story on National Public Radio, but not in the pages of his own paper.

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Chris Hedges, a 20-year war correspondent, author of War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (Free Press) and the forthcoming What Every Person Should Know about War (Free Press) on May 17 actually delivered a commencement address that made his listeners think.

And the students, parents and faculty of little Rockford College in Illinois exploded in anger and drove him from the stage.

The planned 18-minute address--cut shorter by thugs who twice pulled the plug on his microphone, by faculty, guests, and students who shouted him down from the floor, and a flummoxed new college president who told him, after consultation, to wrap it up--was partly a critical analysis of the Iraq war just ended.

But it has not ended, he told them: It has become "a war now of liberation by Iraqis from American occupation." We have become, he said, like Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin, who carry out their senseless and ultimately self-defeating acts of gratuitous violence in Palestine and Chechnya.

Hedges' words came also from the pages of his book, which had earned him the invitation in the first place.

Hedges is not a pacifist. He believes that sometimes, as in Yugoslavia, we must intervene with force to protect basic human rights. But he is a realist about wars.

He has witnessed them all since El Salvador, including the Sudan, Bosnia and Kosovo, and the first Gulf War, where, frustrated by the controls of the Pentagon "pool" system, he broke away from his minders and was captured by the Iraqi Republican Guard.

As a result of his experience, he hates the romantic myth of war, the distorted nationalism by which leaders for selfish purposes drum and bugle their people into living hells, which leave above all the very old, poor, defenseless and young who fight the war ruined for life.

The first interruptions popped when Hedges was 600 words into his text. He had just criticized the "Christian Evangelical groups who had been allowed to follow on the heels of the occupying troops to try to teach Muslims about Jesus." Since Hedges is Harvard Divinity school grad and son of a Presbyterian minister, who had fought in World War II and had become a pacifist on Vietnam, Hedges was speaking with some authority on Jesus as well as on war.

Rockford College, founded in 1847, has Christian Evangelical roots; but, like many once-religious colleges, it does not trumpet a Christian identity on its Web site. Rather, it takes pride in its recent PR image projection, in its "best known alumnae [sic], Jane Addams (class of 1881)," founder of the Chicago settlement house movement and a pacifist, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. The college's vision: "to be Jane Addams' college in the 21st century." Its new motto: "Think. Act. Give a Damn."

In the spirit of Jane Addams, the new president, Paul Pribbenow, who had invited Hedges, took the microphone to plead for academic freedom. He suggested they protest in silence. He was answered by cheers and a foghorn blast.

Quoting Yeats, Sophocles, Thucydides and the Bible, Hedges warned his audience that we have lost touch with the essence of war: Death is hidden from public view.

A man stood up to interrupt. The microphones broke off. The crowd booed.

Hedges' conclusion--on the distinction between comradeship and friendship and how friendship, which is love, is the potent enemy of war--was lost to their ears and minds. Lost in a cacophony of jeers, cheers, foghorns and shouts.

As the students paraded across the stage to pick up their diplomas, campus security hustled Hedges out the gate.

How do your teach values, particularly the value of human life, to young men and women so saturated in the culture of distraction that they can't think beyond next Friday night?

We can sympathize With the president of Rockford, with its 864 students plus many adults, from 10 states and 27 countries, of whom 62 percent are women and 38 percent men. It is not an intellectual powerhouse if only 70 percent its faculty have terminal degrees.

The local Rockford Register Star calls the graduation "One Big Boo," and blames the president for inviting the wrong speaker and the graduates for not letting him speak. Commencement, says the Register Star, is "time for comforting words."

Says who? I've Sat through 35 commencement addresses--some solemn, some silly--since I began college teaching. In many places the addresses have degenerated into cliches from crowd-pleasing celebrities, comedians or TV anchors who make the graduates feel good about seeing "someone famous on their big day." I've heard Alan Alda, Captain Kangaroo, Cokie Roberts and Kurt Waldheim. I remember only two as eloquent--Mario Cuomo and Mary Higgins Clark.