College Grads Hear Mostly From Left

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 2, 2001 | by Hans S. Nichols

College graduates are treated to a final round of politically correct pomp and circumstance featuring commencement speakers who talk out of the left sides of their mouths.

With the predictability of midterm examinations and springtime allergies, commencement ceremonies descended upon college campuses and faded into summer. Once more the annual performances of "Pomp and Circumstance" were delivered in the familiar left sharp. The speakers provided the partisan pomp; the circumstance was another occasion for the American academy to confirm its commitment to political correctness.

According to a review conducted by Insight, Democrats again outnumbered Republicans as homilists at these academic obsequies, especially at elite universities. Of the politicians invited to address the graduates of U.S. News and World Report's top 25 colleges, Democrats took to the podium for 13 speeches and Republicans only three.

That Republicans made a showing at all appears due to the status of George W. Bush as president and the media beatification of his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Bush returned to his alma mater, Yale University, to make nice with the institution that slighted his father and all but endorsed his opponent. In a more serious speech at the University of Notre Dame, the president laid the intellectual and moral framework for relieving the poor in America and worldwide. For his part, McCain drew the rump of the Ivy League and addressed the graduates at the University of Pennsylvania.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., was invited to upstage Bush at Yale by speaking to the senior class the day before. McCain was required to share the Penn honors with Democratic former congressman Floyd Flake, a New York preacher who gave the baccalaureate address.

Elsewhere at established universities, Clinton Cabinet members were featured prominently. Former attorney general Janet Reno spoke at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley, where the commander in chief of the Waco debacle was said to have been invited because of her "liberal and progressive policies."

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright attempted to whip New England crowds at Brown University and Dartmouth College into a frenzy of international activism. Harvard University tapped former secretary of the treasury Robert Rubin. And representing the Al Gore camp (its leader said still to be in political hibernation but upset not to have been asked to speak at Harvard) was his Florida counsel, David Boies, regaling seniors at Columbia University, where Gore taught last semester.

Not that failed presidential candidates were excluded entirely. George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic standard-bearer who lost the electoral vote 520-17, put in an appearance at 2hfts University outside Boston along with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Jim Lehrer of PBS.

Does this confirm suspicions that America's colleges are nothing more than incubators for liberal ideas, mere wards of the Democratic Party? David Horowitz of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture thinks so. "It's a given that 95 percent of college speakers will be liberals, but it's unacceptable," he says.

While this year's 13-3 politician ratio hardly is indicative of balance, the ledger's left side was all but filled by assorted politically correct speakers from institutions regarded as to the port side of even the Democratic Party. Princeton University, for instance, played host to Garrison Keillor of National Public Radio. The University of Chicago heard its own philosophy professor, Martha Craven Nussbaum, who, according to the New York Times, fancies herself a "lawyer for humanity."

Nussbaum tells Insight that "academics have a responsibility to use some of their very privileged and free lives to make things better for others." She adds, "In general, I think the idea that the academy is left wing is a vastly oversold idea."

But Steve Balch, president of the National Association of Scholars, insists that "the pitchers they send to the mound mainly throw with the left hand." He tells Insight the "one-sidedness" of the academic dance card is a tedium endured yearlong. Campus speakers, he says, both "great and obscure," predominantly come from the left, squatting in academic villages all season long. This phenomena is a result of academia's "disinclination to engage in any real debate."

As for the actual commencement addresses, Balch detects a "dumbing down of the American academy." Instead of railing against contemporary trends, speakers now are beholden to pop culture; in some cases they are products of it. This may explain why Princeton selected Keillor and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill brought in an ESPN sportscaster.

Not that politicians and their academic counterparts did not give it the old college try and attempt to wrap political messages in scholarly language. For example, after Reno graced the convocation of her fellow Cornellians, University President Hunter Rawlings III gave the commencement address the following day. Rawlings, an erstwhile classics professor, congratulated the class of 2001 for its "informed social concerns." Indeed, he gushed, "Your concern has extended beyond environmental issues to include societal ones. Some of you worked on a study to determine why the average American worker appears to benefit so little from the economic expansion of recent years. You found that threats to close plants and move corporate capital elsewhere were effectively keeping workers from experiencing real economic gains."