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As the season of college graduations draws
to a close, it is clear that, despite the massacres of September
11, many colleges are more determined than ever before to send
graduates into the world with divisive and politicized
ceremonies, eschewing the themes of optimism and unity
traditionally associated with commencements.
Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the
advent of separate ceremonies for minority groups. While the
blood shed at the World Trade Center and Pentagon was the same
color for all who were murdered, many universities have decided
that the best way to prepare their graduates for an increasingly
diverse society is to hold segregated graduations.
In 2002, the University of California at
Santa Cruz held a special ceremony for over 45 gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender students. This event even included
local high school and community college graduates,
indoctrinating them into the separatist campus orthodoxy. At
Iowa State University, the “Lavender Graduation” was held to
honor lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. The
University of Michigan also sponsors a separate homosexual
graduation.
Other segregated ceremonies focus on race
and ethnicity, sometimes with curious omissions. This year the
University of Texas at Austin held a separate graduation event
for racial and ethnic minorities that included African-American,
Hispanic, and Native American students, but excluded Asian
Americans. Similarly, the California State Polytechnic
University at San Luis Obispo convenes a special ceremony only
for black students.
The University of California at Los
Angeles (UCLA) attempts to cover all the bases, holding a
“Lavender Graduation” for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender students, a “Raza Graduation” for Latinos, as
well as separate graduations for Filipinos, Asian Pacific
Islanders, African-Americans, Iranians, and American Indians.
Even when graduations do not themselves
promote divisiveness through separate minority ceremonies,
left-wing commencement speakers often create discord by making
egregious remarks. Perhaps the most offensive commencement
address in 2002 was delivered by Professor bell hooks (sic), who
rejects capitalization as an invalid social construct, at
Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.
hooks stated, "The radical, dissident
voices among you have learned here at Southwestern how to form
communities of resistance that have helped you find your way in
the midst of life-threatening conservatism, loneliness, and the
powerful forces of everyday fascism which use the politics of
exclusion and ostracism to maintain the status quo. Every
terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's
spirits."
hooks declared, “Indeed our nation's
call for violence in the aftermath of 9/11 was an expression of
widespread hopelessness, the cynicism that has been at the heart
of our nation's ongoing fascination with death.” She
said that following 9/11:
“Many Americans experienced for the first time a
moment of clarity when they knew without a doubt that to choose
life, we must stand against violence, we must choose peace. And
yet that moment of collective clarity was soon obscured by the
imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal hunger
to show the planet our nation's force, to show that this nation
would commit absolute acts of violence that will wipe out whole
nations and worlds. The world was held spellbound by our
government's declaration of its commitment to violence, to
death."
At Smith College in Massachusetts, law
Professor Lani Guinier, responding to President Bush’s
statement at the Yale commencement last year that he
demonstrates even “C” students can be President, remarked,
“You, too, can be President, but only if you're a straight
white man." Apparently, Guinier is unaware of polls showing
the vast majority of Americans would vote for a minority
President, including specific surveys indicating that Colin
Powell could have won the Presidency in 2000.
While leftists like hooks and Guinier who
do not hold public office are often invited to give commencement
speeches, a Young America’s Foundation study shows
conservatives who do not hold public office are rarely asked to
speak. Even when conservatives do deliver commencement
addresses, a protest can almost always be counted on. For
example, students protested Condoleeza Rice this year at
Stanford University. Liberal students even denounced apolitical
children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, who spoke this year at
Dartmouth University, his alma mater, because he is not “a
human rights activist.”
When black soldiers fought valiantly for
America beside whites in World War II, it helped inspire the
great civil rights movement of the 1960’s. Likewise, September
11 has renewed similar feelings of patriotism and unity in
American society. However, as the commencements of 2002 show,
academia remains a bastion of political correctness that rejects
the integrationist model of the original civil rights movement
and instead sows divisiveness and dissension into the hearts and
minds of America’s young people.
Levin is President of the Houston-based
American Freedom Center (www.americanfreedomctr.org) and can be
reached at [email protected].
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