GRADUATING STUDENTS: Shut up and listen to those who have made it!

I don’t know if anyone noticed but in this graduation season a number of invited commencement speakers declined to attend due to student protests against them giving the commencement address.

I can somewhat understand this. There are some speakers that are so offensive to the student body that they do not want them at THEIR graduation ceremony. But I would think that the university leadership would be sensitive to their student’s sensibilities that they would not invite someone to deliver the commencement address that is so repugnant to the student body.

 Condoleezza Rice declined to attend due to student protests. Although she is an accomplished person she was an apologist for President Bush and his ill-fated invasion of Iraq that cost us so much money and so many lives.

But what are you looking for in a commencement speaker? Someone that has made it to the top which is what these graduates are dreaming of doing so her advice may actually be valuable even if she did not behave the way we think she should have; it’s about the journey to the top.

Actually her story from a poor neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, fighting racism and other factors to eventually becoming the secretary of state; does not sound too shabby.

Another speaker who declined to speak because of student protests was the female head of the International Monetary Fund; some students did not like how the IMF operated. Another was a social activist who said some bad things about Islam.

Another person who declined an invitation to speak was Richard Birgeneau a former chancellor at the University of California, Berkley. Dr. Birgeneau’s liberal reputation is stellar but because there was a student protest at Berkley in 2011 under his watch, which was violently squelched by police, some students at Haverford College asked that he apologize for the way students were handled during that protest and explain his role in the incident. Birgeneau told them to eat shit.

William Bowen, former president at Princeton, who replaced Birgeneau as commencement speaker, called the students protesting Birgeneau immature and arrogant. He told the students that you should not expect to agree with commencement speakers about everything but you should agree that these speakers have had and continue to have, exemplary lives because they took a path in life that got them to the top.

Graduating seniors think they are really smart because they got a degree and will find out very shortly that wisdom does not come with a degree but with experience and action.

I remember getting back into Wayne State University after serving four years in the Air Force and I remember my classes being disrupted by hippies in military jackets trying to protest one thing or another. I just wanted to tell them to quit wasting my precious time with your ignorant drivel. You have not yet lived an adult life and you got all these opinions about how life should be…grow up!

And that is how I feel about these graduates trying to protest anybody and everybody that does not quite fit their mold of the perfect individual…shut the fuck up and listen; you may just learn something!