Sunday, May 07, 2006

McCain in the Membrane

The New School books John McCain as commencement speaker and the students loose it.

...And then Inside Higher Ed does an article about it, and the trolls on the message board lose it.

As always, free speech is important. But, who thought this would be a good idea? Booking John McCain for the New School is like booking Karen Finley for the Liberty University commencement. Also, I've never really understood why the students don't get to pick their commencement speakers anyway. Isn't this day celebrating them?

2 comments:

SecondComingOfBast said...

Students should certainly have some say in who is selected to speak. They should at least be allowed to choose from a profferred list, to which they could hopefully add suggestions.

Politicians should always be suspect in any case. You know what "graduation" McCain is really looking forward to.

Rufus said...

Yeah, that kind of stinks when you've worked for four years to get a diploma, and then your commencement speaker uses the platform to make a public announcement about something totally unrelated. At my graduation, we had Queen Noor and Margaret Thatcher as speakers, which was nice. But, Thatcher went on and on about the "Wah on Tewwoh" as she pronounced it, and really said nothing at all about graduating, or our futures or any of that sort of thing.