It is May, the month that the speaker invited to the graduation ceremony at your favorite college or university may — or may not — be allowed to orate.
It all depends if all the enlightened grads and faculty members feel “comfortable” with the invitee. If anyone feels “uncomfortable” or “threatened,” protests are likely.
This is called the season of the “disinvitation.” In other words, freedom of expression on campuses is a wonderful thing, as long as everyone agrees with it. If not, the speaker may get a dis-invite.
The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) keeps track of such institutional hooliganism. It reports there have been 192 verified protests of graduation speakers since 2000, and 53 disinvitations were issued.
In addition, 17 speakers voluntarily chose not to attend after protests were mounted.
Fortunately, none of these outbursts of “political correctness” have happened at Colorado’s bastions of higher learning. But a report by FIRE says protests were equally spread between public, private and sectarian schools.
The list includes Rutgers, Harvard, Michigan, Illinois, Swarthmore, UCLA, Smith and Notre Dame.
Among the disinvited speakers were Condoleezza Rice, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dr. Ben Carson, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and International Monetary Fund director Christine Lagarde. Even George W. Bush and Barack Obama are on the list.
Bush leads the league in protests with seven.
Ari Cohn of FIRE said the protests initially started as liberal groups trying to block conservative-oriented speakers from mounting the podium. But conservatives also are now engaging in outrage.
Cohn said that might be because they also wanted to prove they could play the disinvitation game. Liberals still lead in successfully blocking speakers by about 2-to-1.
Liberals who have been told to stay home include Angela Davis, Bill Ayres, and our own Ward Churchill, the former University of Colorado professor.
But you don’t have to have strong political views either way to get disinvited. For instance, a protest was mounted at Villanova University a dozen years ago against Caroll Spinney, who used to wear a canary suit and portray Big Bird on “Sesame Street.” Spinney was finally allowed to speak, but not until after a lot of feathers were ruffled.
Cohn says the protest of commencement speakers has waned somewhat in recent years, “possibly because more boring and predictable speakers are being invited and possibly because students have found bigger and better things to protest.”
A troubling trend, he explains, is the fact that organized opposition to speakers invited to merely speak to various groups on campuses is increasing. For example, if the Young Republicans want to hear John McCain, the riot police may have to be on standby.
The suppression of free speech is more likely to occur at schools that have rigid policies against expression that may offend someone. In other words, places where weak-backboned college administrators have already knuckled under to other protests of one kind or another.
FIRE rates colleges across the land on these policies. All but one in Colorado rank high for suppressing expression. The exception is Western State University. Kids might well go to school in Gunnison if they want to prepare for the real world.
Dick Hilker (dhilker529 @aol.com) is a retired Denver suburban area newspaper editor and columnist.
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