It is graduation season and colleges commencements are replete with guest speakers. The vast majority will speak without drawing comment – but the occasional high-profile and controversial speaker will roil the student body.
Condoleeza Rice is the best known of this year’s casualties. Her scheduled speech at Rutgers University was cancelled after protests painted her a “war criminal”. It is unconscionable. Rutgers should have welcomed an American, who was born with three strikes against her – poor, female and black – yet reached the pinnacle. (Note: Last years speaker was Virginia Long. Who? Exactly!)
As a practical matter, whatever you think of Rice’s actions as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, she hasn’t been convicted, let alone indicted, of a crime. Liberals, who condemn Rice without trial, give legitimacy to the conservatives, who would do the same to Obama.
As a matter of personal development, listening to only one side of a debate, is intellectually crippling. Liberals accuse Conservatives of living in “the bubble” of Fox News and right-wing talk radio. They do exactly the same by censoring their commencement speakers.
College is not what it once was – and that is a good thing. Until the 1960s the curriculum was exclusively Eurocentric and cultural studies were largely based on the writings and reasoning of dead white men. Social upheaval challenged the orthodoxy. And it was proper to recognize the different view points of women, minorities and non-Europeans.
But political correctness has run amok. It is one thing to acknowledge different voices, but to diminish the Western tradition is to ignore the reality of American history. We are a country whose laws are based on European jurisprudence. Our thought, philosophy, and artistic traditions developed from the work of dead white men. To reject that is to reject reality.
It is as bad as evolution and global warming denial.
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