BY HANK REICHMAN

Commencement season has come to a close for another year, so perhaps it is a good time to reflect on the sometimes thorny issue of the extent to which challenges to commencement speakers, especially those invited to receive an honorary degree, represent a threat to free speech or academic freedom.  As Princeton professor Keith Whittington has suggested in a recent article on the subject (published in an unfortunately quite costly collection), challenges to such speakers “seem to come in waves,” with the most recent upsurge perhaps peaking during the Obama administration when “spring-time protests over commencement speakers had become an annual ritual and colleges had become the butt of jokes.”  By 2015, Whittington writes, the Chronicle of Higher Education was calling selection of commencement speakers a political “minefield.”

But this year the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) “disinvitation database” recorded only five challenges to commencement speakers, just two of which resulted in an actual “disinvitation.”  In one of those cases former Nebraska Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey withdrew voluntarily from a scheduled appearance at Creighton University after the state’s Republican Party called for his disinvitation over his support for abortion rights.  In the other case Jeh Johnson, secretary of homeland security under President Obama, withdrew as commencement speaker at the University of Southern California after student and faculty protests over his views on immigration.  In both cases the withdrawals were, it seems, voluntary.

Perhaps this year’s most controversial commencement address was delivered by a student.  At New York University, Steven Thrasher, who received a Ph.D, used his valedictory to endorse protests against “that Fascist in the White House” and to praise the anti-Israel boycott movement.  He was harshly rebuked by NYU’s president, his dean, and the president of Northwestern University, where Thrasher will assume a faculty position this fall.  On this blog both John Wilson and the NYU chapter of the AAUP condemned these responses as threats to academic freedom, but law professor Steven Lubet argued that “Thrasher’s self-indulgent political harangue was simply rude to his captive audience, assembled on a singular occasion for a completely different purpose.”  Added Lubet, “No one has ever suggested that Thrasher should be punished or prevented from advocating his political views, regarding President Trump, Israel, or anything else, in any other setting.”

Who is right here?  And are protests against commencement speakers justified in opposing invited speakers?  In The Future of Academic Freedom I wrote:

It is surely true that in some instances student objections to controversial commencement speakers may inappropriately chill discussion.  But a closer look at the phenomenon reveals that students are often more concerned about whether speakers were chosen with meaningful participation by student representatives than they are with the content of the speeches or the pedigree of the speakers.  Protesting students often point out that a commencement speaker is not an ordinary campus speaker. Those invited are generally given some honor, usually a symbolic degree, and hence their words are provided a sort of official “stamp of approval” that would not necessarily be the case for those invited during the school year by an academic program or a student group. . . .  In addition, students say, commencement is not a classroom or a traditional forum for debate; it is a celebration of the graduates and their achievements, and speaker choices should recognize that.  On ordinary occasions when an objectionable speaker comes to campus, students who disagree can boycott the speech or peacefully protest outside.  But is it fair to ask them to boycott or demonstrate at their own commencement?

Whether or not that is a fair question, I should mention that during my own university-wide commencement at Columbia University in 1969 I participated in just such a protest.  At the time the effects of the previous year’s mass student rebellion were still deeply felt.  So when Interim President Andrew Cordier rose to speak I and about 100 of my classmates stood up and walked out silently in protest.  Our objection to Cordier concerned as much his role as a liberal Cold Warrior as anything he had done or failed to do at Columbia.  And, of course, since we began to walk out before he even started his address we certainly were not objecting to what he would say.  I’ll return to Columbia shortly.

“Commencement speakers are a somewhat unusual feature of the intellectual environment of most American college campuses,” writes Whittington.

The commencement speaker is expected to add to a celebratory occasion and not necessarily elevate the intellectual discourse on campus. The speaker is not generally expected to push intellectual boundaries, raise difficult questions, or lay out provocative arguments.  There is no give-and-take with the audience or other speakers. The speaker is expected to say something suitably soothing and gratifying, to provide a bit of motivation and inspiration, and perhaps hit a note of nostalgia and acclaim.  The speaker might challenge the graduating seniors to go out into the world and do well, but will probably not challenge them to reassess their most firmly held convictions.  The commencement speaker lifts up, but does not unsettle.

Historian of higher education John Thelin agrees.  He calls commencement

a highly ritualized event.  The address resembles a liturgy in that the sponsors and the speaker most of all want things to go smoothly and with decorum.  So, the usual aim is to be inspirational rather than confrontational or controversial.  Also, it cannot be too long.  As the size of graduating classes has increased, this last feature seems banal, but really is crucial to the planners and organizers.

The dilemma a thoughtful invited speaker faces is to stay within these boundaries yet still leave the audience and perhaps the media with some memorable, distinctive insight or statement.  Apart from blatant, deliberate volatile statements intended to fan controversy, a speaker will be secondary in importance to the awarding of degrees and celebrating by graduating students and their families.

Lubet agrees as well:

University graduation addresses are famously bland, featuring acknowledgements and congratulations, perhaps leavened with benign humor, balanced with vague calls to public service, and rounded off with sunny assurances of a bright future.  If not exactly an art form, it is certainly a formula that graduates and their parents have come to expect and appreciate.  Even political figures avoid controversy during their twenty minutes of podium time, recognizing that the assembled guests are of many minds and persuasions, and no one has come other than to celebrate the conclusion of studies and commencement of the next chapter in life.

But one commenter on Lubet’s post responded that “Commencements are political: choices of speakers are political.  It is ridiculous to claim they are a special form in which the educated denizens who are their audience need to be shielded.”

My action and that of my classmates fifty years ago was certainly political and, the polarization of the times notwithstanding, we likely offended as many in the audience as Thrasher would this year.  I expect there were many offended as well when in the same year at Wellesley College a young Hillary Rodham used her valedictory to condemn the Vietnam War, not yet as unpopular as it would become some years later.  And certainly one of the most famous of commencement addresses — that of Secretary of State General George Marshall at Harvard in 1947, where he used the occasion to announce the Marshall Plan — was certainly nothing if not political.

Also political, I might add, was Columbia President Lee Bollinger’s eloquent 2017 address to graduates, which, while mentioning no names, clearly bemoaned the political path the country had sadly chosen the previous November.  At the same time, members of Columbia’s graduate student employee union were distributing fliers to the crowd condemning the university’s refusal to recognize and negotiate with them, a stance Columbia has now happily at long last abandoned.  Again this year Bollinger used commencement ceremonies to bemoan how

a new threat to our core values has emerged, around the world and in this country.  The rise of authoritarianism—often in the guise of democratically elected despots—has become the defining feature of modern life. The tactics, unfortunately, are age-old and time-tested. There must be an in-group, conceived around religious, ethnic, racial, or nationalistic lines.  And an out-group, typically foreigners, immigrants, elites, or an opposing party. . . .    The undermining of honest discourse has occurred, so far, not through official acts of censorship but through more indirect—if not very subtle—means of suppression: The free press is labeled the “enemy of the people.”  The irrefutable science underlying our understanding of climate change is portrayed as a fabrication propagated for a political agenda.  And universities are increasingly cast as incubators of intolerance and enemies of free expression—a sensationalist charge disproved by the consistent presence on university campuses, including Columbia, of controversial speakers from both the Left and the Right.

As noble as Bollinger’s sentiments surely are, they are just as surely political.  And I have little doubt that there were some in attendance, among both graduates and guests, who were troubled by them, if not offended.

Still, such speeches are likely to be uncommon, if not rare.  To better understand the phenomenon Whittington assembled a database of some 444 commencement speakers reported by the website Inside Higher Ed in spring 2017.  He found that schools “invite a wide range of figures to campus to serve as commencement speakers.  Some are figures of national or even global renown, but many others are most likely to be familiar primarily to a local audience.”  Most favored, he found, are business leaders (but apparently rarely, if ever, a union leader).  Some seek to “spice up” the proceedings by turning to the entertainment industry, although only few can muster the resources to bring in national celebrities — unless that celebrity is an alum.  “Colleges seemed to lean toward relatively centrist figures for commencement speakers,” he found.  And even among speakers chosen from higher education itself, “colleges seemed to prefer to play it safe.  Many academic figures chosen to speak to graduates occupied positions in the senior administration of universities and colleges, and presumably could be counted on to keep their remarks suitably neutral.  Active academics might be somewhat more pointed in their remarks, but universities in the spring of 2017 tended to favor professors with relatively unobjectionable research agendas.”

From this survey Whittington concludes,

On the whole, universities do not seem to prefer to use the selection of commencement speakers as an opportunity to advance a particular ideological message.  Less than a fifth of the spring 2017 speakers in this sample had a clear political orientation, though among those who did the left side of the political spectrum was far better represented than the right.  No doubt this is a somewhat conservative estimate, for surely many nominally non-ideological speakers like the heads of nonprofit organizations or artists and authors have distinct political and social commitments of their own.  It would be interesting indeed to see an analysis of the actual content of commencement addresses and the political valence of the messages being delivered to graduates.  But campus protests over speaker selection usually have little to do with the content of the commencement address.  It is the identity of the speaker that generates the controversy, not the substance of the speech.  For many colleges, the safest route appears to be to turn to prominent alumni, wealthy benefactors, and individuals with inspirational life stories.  Pizza magnates, musicians, and astronauts are presumably less likely to stir up protests on campus than presidential aspirants and opinion columnists.  But if playing it safe with anodyne speakers is what it takes to allow a graduation ceremony to go off smoothly, then the intellectual climate on college campuses may not be as robust as one would like.

This conclusion seems sensible, but to be honest I doubt whether commencement should be considered a significant measure of the campus intellectual climate.  As one University of Oklahoma professor put it, “Even when the commencement speakers occasionally seem to be offering no more than another heaping helping of slow-roasted banalities, the totality of the experience — especially visiting with the families of my students — returns me, without fail, to the optimistic and idealistic frame of mind that led me to be a teaching scholar in the first place.”  And it is that experience that should remain at the center of the event.

Perhaps as critical as the choice of a speaker is the process by which such choices are made.  It may be close to impossible to always guess which speaker, which prominent alum, which entertainment personality, which local political figure, which businessman, might stir opposition, regardless of the proposed message.  But if representative students and faculty are meaningfully involved in the selection there may be some assurance that protest can be managed.

Nonetheless, in the end, as I learned for myself decades ago, it’s far from the worst fate to have to walk out of your own commencement ceremony in protest.