Fish In Barrel

At the risk of being called for unsportsmanlike conduct, I’m going to shoot fish in barrel.
We’re wrapping up commencement season at colleges across the land, which means that the usual craziness-on-campus stories are augmented with crazy-graduation-speaker stories. It might not be sporting to point out that many American liberal arts schools are not only sending yet another cohort of degree-bearers out into a world for which they were not prepared, they are adding insult to debt-laden injury by making them sit through a final worthless lecture called the “commencement address.” But that’s what has happened again this year.
At New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, speaker and doctoral graduate Steven Thrasher called President Donald Trump a “fascist” and praised the unsanitary, sometimes violent, and ultimately ineffective Occupy Wall Street movement. He urged his fellow doctoral graduates to continue their fight against various perceived evils.
No one in the cheering crowd of newly minted graduate-degree holders bothered to point out that “fascism” by definition is “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator…subject to stringent governmental controls and violent suppression of the opposition…” If we truly had a fascist in the White House, Dr. Thrasher and his ilk would be in the Big House, or worse.
History is full of stories of brave citizens risking everything to challenge actual fascist regimes. Unfortunately, none of Professor Thrasher’s students – he’s accepted a teaching position at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism – are likely going to learn about them. No wonder the profession of journalism is circling the drain. What you get is what you’ve got; from the schoolhouse to the newsroom, journalism has got a lot of the educated-ignorant in its ranks.
At Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, Ericka Hart – who works in NYC as a sex educator for students in kindergarten through 5th grade (!) – started her address by recognizing “the black people that have been pushed out of Amherst.” She then criticized “white-supremacist capitalism,” which I’m sure is not a real thing. But what else to expect from a self-described “social justice practitioner, sexuality educator, descendant of slaves, and cancer survivor.” One wonders if she’s ever considered her cancer survival odds if not for the modern medical miracles provided by capitalism…or what she’d be doing if she were an African, not an American.
This isn’t the first time Hampshire College has chosen a liberal graduation speaker unguided by logic and reason. Two years ago, the college invited a Princeton University professor of African American Studies to give the commencement address. She accused President Donald Trump of being a “racist, sexist megalomaniac.” She told the graduates that “The political and economic status quo in this country has failed over and over again to deliver a better way to the vast majority of people in this country” and that our system “gnaws away at the tiny threads that millions of people are hanging on to in their daily struggles to make ends meet.”
Has this professor changed her tune in the two years since our “megalomaniac-in-chief” has delivered record-breaking economic gains to our African American citizens, dramatically improving the prospects of thousands of her fellow black Americans? Could she name a country that has lifted more people out of the natural human state of poverty? Figure the odds.
Perhaps Hampshire’s leaders need to take a class on capitalism. Mass Live reported last week that “about a third of Hampshire College’s trustees left the board around the time the school’s president abruptly resigned” and that the school faces “financial uncertainty.” The school’s interim president stated that, to remain independent, the college needs to raise $100 million in the next five to six years. Good luck with that. My money is on Hampshire College joining the now-closed Southern Vermont College in shuttering its doors and putting its property up for sale. That’s what happens to businesses that don’t provide value for the money.
The list of politically divisive, liberal-leaning graduation speakers is long; the list of right-leaning speakers short. In fact, according to a survey by the Young America’s Foundation there was only one conservative commencement speaker among the nation’s top 50 universities. While not every one of those 49 liberals was as goofy as the examples above, it is safe to say that most graduates are not being given a fair and balanced viewpoint as they move from the academy into the real world.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a new trend is developing on campuses: Separate (but equal?) graduation ceremonies. Yes, in our institutions most enraptured by the cult of inclusivity, diversity, and equity, we are seeing more and more segregated ceremonies for blacks and the alphabet-soup that starts with the letters L, G, B, and T.
What would MLK have said about that?