The college cats get liberal tongue; commencement speakers at America's elite colleges and universities continue to lean leftward, with pop-culture icons topping the list for the baccalaureates

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Hans S. Nichols

Goldie Hawn--actress, social activist, mom and college dropout. And now, commencement speaker. The same can be said of Johnny Moseley, an Olympic skier and gold medalist who was invited to give the commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley. Moseley was as surprised as his audience by his newfound academic credibility, joking that the last time he heard from Berkeley it was from the admissions department in a letter that began, "Dear Mr. Moseley, we regret to inform you...." He then asked his dumbfounded audience, "Does that mean that Maya Angelou is going to speak at the X Games?"

Moseley and Hawn are typical of this year's commencement speakers. According to INSIGHT's annual review of graduation homilists, the 2002 list of speakers is both less political and less serious than in previous years. However, one trend remains constant: liberal speakers outnumber conservative ones.

Before the likes of Hawn, Bill Cosby and Whoopi Goldberg donned academic robes at the end of the year, serious speeches usually were the expectation rather than the exception. In 1963 at American University in Washington (where Hawn delivered the main speech this year) President John F. Kennedy used the commencement platform to deliver a major policy address. As Bob Dylan might have said: The times they are a-changin'.

For example, this year Hawn warmed up the crowd with statements such as, "Now is the time for you to go to the college of You." Thirty-nine years ago Kennedy avoided the solipsistic in favor of a broader worldview, vowing to work for "not merely peace in our time but peace for all time." By contrast Hawn's advice could have been lifted from a local yoga instructor: "Find out who you are, what you think. Learn to listen to the sounds of your own heart."

Shelves of books have been written to debunk Kennedy's bleatings about peace at the height of the Cold War, with some scholars having found his rejection of a "Pax Americana [to] enforce [peace] on the world by American weapons of war" particularly quaint. But few would question the weighty intentions of that address.

Does the increased appearance of actors, comedians and pop celebrities represent a lamentable decline in the standards of graduation speeches? After all, Winston Churchill's inimitable phrase about an "iron curtain" falling over Europe was uttered at a graduation ceremony at obscure Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., in 1946. Students were listening--and so, evidently, was the world. Are today's orators playing to an undergraduate subculture instead of speaking from experience to the future?

"Over time, speakers have tried to put themselves more and more in the shoes of the people who graduate and realize that none of them really remember what's being said," writes Peter J. Smith, an editor of a compilation of commencement speeches, in the Washington Post.

But light and fluffy speeches aren't necessarily an unfortunate development, says Jerry Martin of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "It's perfectly fine that, instead of a dreary message, you listen to someone who was successful in athletics or entertainment give an uplifting or even humorous talk to celebrate the day. It's a celebration," says Martin. In fact, the more serious speeches tend to be more overtly political, drifting leftward along the way.

Even within the pool of lighter speakers few, if any, can be called conservative. Martin recalls one period at Emory University in Atlanta when "they had more communists than they did Republicans."

Indeed, according to a review by Young America's Foundation (YAF), a conservative group based in Herndon, Va., "Commencement speakers at the nation's most elite schools are weighted to the left." In previous years, the preponderance of overtly political speakers could, in part, be explained away by the occupant of the White House as prominent Democratic politicians, plucked from the Clinton administration, made for interesting speakers.

However, with George W. Bush in the White House, his Cabinet secretaries have not been A-list commencement commodities, giving credibility to the charge that the liberal elite schools continue to be expert at the politics of excluding conservatives. "For the ninth consecutive year our most prestigious schools excluded scholars such as Milton Friedman, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Thomas Sowell for the likes of such left-wing activists as Morris Dees, Lani Guinier, Madeleine Albright and Whoopi Goldberg. College administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture," says Ron Robinson, president of YAF.

INSIGHT'S own annual review of speakers at U.S. News and World Report's list of top-25 colleges found that four prominent Republicans and four prominent Democrats were selected to deliver speeches. Last year's tally was 13 prominent Democrats to three prominent Republicans. But as Steven Balch of the National Association of Scholars points out, all of the invited Republicans this year are associated with 9/11. New York Gov. George Pataki spoke at his alma mater, Yale, while former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani addressed the law-school graduates at Georgetown and undergrads at Syracuse. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was invited back to speak at Stanford University, where she was provost prior to leaving for Washington to serve the president as director of national security. And Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge spoke at Carnegie Mellon Institute in his native Pennsylvania.