May19

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

This Week in Schadenfreude: Mortarboarded

There are about 4,300 universities in the United States, assuming we include USC. Each of those universities has at least one graduation ceremony each year. Most of them have more than one, and some of them have dozens. To take the UCs, as an example that is particularly familiar to us, it is not practical to have 10,000 people graduate at the same time. So, each college and each professional school usually has its own graduation ceremony. It's also become increasingly common for individual departments to have their own ceremonies, and for student groups (say, Samahang Filipino or the Muslim Students Assocation) to have graduation ceremonies as well. (Z) has known many people who "graduated" 5-6 times over the course of graduation week, though he successfully managed to avoid all but one graduation ceremony for himself (and he didn't particularly want to go to that one).

Part of the custom, when it comes to graduation ceremonies, is to have a graduation speaker. The bigger the name, the better. And when a top-tier university is staging one of its major graduation ceremonies (say, the law school graduation, or the graduation for the college of letters and sciences), they really want a star. This has created a situation where prominent politicians are often engaged to provide the commencement speech. The politician gets a photo-op in academic robes, and a captive audience for whatever they want to say, and sometimes an honorary degree to boot. The school gets a high-profile person they can brag about and, depending on the goals of the administration, perhaps an opportunity for some propagandizing.

Despite the fact that graduation is ostensibly their day, students get virtually no say in all of this. It's hard enough to land a commencement speaker, and then trying to hold some sort of vote would be a logistical nightmare. Further, if a person is rejected by the students, then what does the school do? "Sorry, governor, the students decided to yank the invitation. Sorry about that, and please don't cut our funding! Maybe next year?"

The result of this dynamic is predictable; sometimes students get to spend one of the biggest days of their lives watching as someone they find odious is feted, and treated as some sort of conquering hero. And any sort of pushback is frowned upon, since the commencement speaker is an "honored guest," after all. Plus, the parents and the alums are watching.

This graduation season, however, there have been a number of cases of students deciding that, custom be damned, they weren't going to passively accept an objectionable commencement speaker. Three examples:

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) was the commencement speaker for the law school graduation at City University of New York (CUNY). We will likely have an item on this next week, but he's one of those Democrats who has decided the secret is to govern as a Republican. Then EVERYONE will love you, right? Maybe not so much. The graduates were not interested in what Adams in selling and, in particular, they were upset about the Mayor's response to the Jordan Neely incident. And so, while Adams spoke, some of the grads booed, while many more stood and turned so that their backs were facing him.
  
  
• Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) is very obviously anti-education. Or, more accurately, he is someone who has created a fantasy version of how the educational system really works, and then weaponized that in order to accrue political power. It turns out that many students at George Mason University, where he was commencement speaker for the main undergraduate ceremony, have noticed this. They circulated a petition to have him removed. When that failed, many students either turned their backs on the Governor, or walked out of the ceremony.
  
  
• New College, which has become Ron DeSantis' propaganda project, chose an absolutely radioactive commencement speaker. That would be Scott Atlas, the "Baghdad Bob" science "advisor" to Donald Trump whose job was to go on camera during the pandemic and tell everyone that all was well. Atlas is not an appropriate choice for any graduation, we would say, but certainly not for New College. That's like sending Dylan Mulvaney to speak at the commencement for Bob Jones University. The administration doesn't give a damn what the students think, or at very least is too scared of DeSantis to push back against him, so the graduating class didn't bother with petitions or protests. Nope, they just held their own, independent graduation.

A lot of these political graduation speakers are obnoxious people, and while they should leave the politics at the door, they often don't. Meanwhile, university administrations have gotten far too comfortable with not considering the needs and concerns of students, even on a day that is supposed to be for the students. So, we commend those students who clawed a little bit of that power back, and did what they could to graduate on their own terms. (Z)