Well, they do if it’s about using sunscreen.
For those that didn’t consider the repercussions of their decisions, how’s that reputation burnishing going for ya? If you can’t forsee the potential 2nd and 3rd order effects of such decisions, you have no business being an administrator.
I imagine it’s a teeter totter and sometimes you get the counterweight right and sometimes you go flying off the ride.
Also, I suspect the administration sees a fiery give and take throughout the school year where controversial speakers show up and polemicise and then everyone has a good dustup followed by a beer afterwards and forgets that there’s no dustup after the polemicising at a commencement speech.
You can’t be serious. How would any of us know that we should “follow our dreams” and that we can “achieve anything we set our minds to” or that “we hold to future in our hands” without commencement speakers?
I’m willing to bet the administration’s concern in a lot of these bookings isn’t so much, “Will there be a protest over this,” as “Will the protest over this be small enough that we can safely ignore it?”
Daniel Pipes spoke at my university in 2001. The “protest” was three people at the back of the room holding “end hate” and “one race” signs.
Didn’t Rutgers pay Snooki (“Jersey Shore”) thirty thousand dollars to come speak at some event?
I can certainly see why she’s a more appropriate speaker than Condoleezza Rice.
She wasn’t a speaker. She was “performing” - the money came from the student programming board, which arranges concerts and things. It wasn’t at a graduation or anything; the commencement speaker that semester was Toni Morrison. I can’t imagine paying Snooki $32,000 to do anything other than fuck right off, but it’s the students’ money to burn.
Snooki is responsible for fewer American deaths…
and has a better rack.
Obama spoke at my graduation. Is Snooki more qualified to give that speech that him as well?
After thinking about it for a moment, I think Snooki might actually be a somewhat appropriate speaker at some Business colleges and/or the Media/Entertainment departments of some colleges. She has taken her personality, which many people would be repelled by in real life, and made it into a successful brand.
This is not that big a deal - the opinions of college students are really not that important. At that age they are mostly over-emotional morons who worship either someone like Audrey Lourde or Ayn Rand.
Why was it felt necessary to publish this screed on a Canadian website?
They both already have degrees from MIT.
I teach at a university, and i’m one of the usual left-liberal types who, in some ways at least, fit the campus stereotype.
If the students threatening protests were intending to protest outside the commencement venue, or at other locations on campus, i’ve got no problem with it. If their intention was to disrupt to commencement itself, then i do have a problem with it. I believe that efforts to disrupt invited speakers on university campuses by shouting them down during their speeches is a violation of the principles of free speech and open dialog that are (or should be) central to the university ideal.
When i was in grad school at Johns Hopkins, there was a sponsored lecture series each year. They still have it. Hopkins, being a wealthy and prestigious university, gets some big names, including folks like Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Maya Angelou, Newt Gingrich, and Antonin Scalia.
When i was there, one of the guests was Ann Coulter, and i went along, just to get first-hand experience of the crazy. During Coulter’s (predictably awful) speech, there were periodic interruptions as protestors tried to yell over her, and were then removed from the hall. Each time it happened, the speech had to be stopped temporarily while the offenders were removed.
This sort of thing, in my opinion, undermines the principle of free speech. Not because it deprives Coulter of free speech, per se, or of a platform for her dumb opinions, but because universities run these sorts of events precisely for the free and open exchange of ideas. The idea of inviting someone to give a speech (and, for the purposes of my argument, i don’t give a flying fuck if they’re paid or not) is that you, as a campus community, are ready and willing to listen to what they have to say, even if you’re pretty sure that you disagree with everything they believe.
Now, of course, some of these types argue that “Coulter has a right to speak, and i have a right to speak too, so i should be allowed to protest.” But engaging in debate is not the same as trying to drown someone out by shouting over them. If you just keep yelling at someone you disagree with, so that they never get a chance to express their opinion or argue their position, you’re not really a believer in the free exchange of ideas.
This has nothing, really, to do with first amendment rights or any other legal issue. I’m talking about a matter of principle here. If you truly believe in the *ideal *of free speech and open dialog and the exchange of ideas, then you don’t try to shut someone up by yelling at them or interrupting them. If you don’t like what they say, you can ignore them, you can walk away, you can encourage other people not to attend their speeches, or you can take the time to debate with them at an appropriate time, but shouting them down is a violation of the ideals that universities are supposed to uphold.
I think you are mistaken. Universities are supposed to be dedicated to the pursuit of truth. Since my ideas are objective truth, anyone who disagrees with my ideas is not pursuing the truth, by definition.
It is a false equivalence to pretend that, just because a different opinion exists, it deserves to be heard. It doesn’t, and is just wasting time that is better spent discussing (and implementing) my ideas.
Freely exchanging ideas is a great thing, but they have to be the right ideas. On certain topics - race, politics, abortion, gender issues, tax policy - there is exactly one set of ideas that is correct, and anyone who dissents from those ideas is necessarily working against the search for truth and for justice.
Regards,
Shodan
Very much in the spirit of Alinsky.
The irony is painful.
Shodan, i know it might feed your conservative persecution complex to believe that your ironic diatribe is typical of attitudes among college liberals, but in my experience the people who actually fit your caricature are a small minority.
They do exist, to be sure, but in nowhere near the numbers that blowhard conservatives would have us believe. In my own department, and among the university faculty who constitute a significant percentage of my friends and acquaintances, most people would agree with what i wrote in my previous post.