5.08.00
Welcome to the Real World

5.05.00
Mr. Kurtz, He Alive & Well.

5.04.00
Cardinal O'Connor, R.I.P.

5.02.00
Who's Yelling ‘Stop!’ Now?

4.28.00
Shilling For Castro

4.27.00
Senator Hillary?

4.26.00
Potemra v. Lopez: It's Pro Life Research

4.26.00
Potemra v. Lopez: Why Both Reeve and Potemra Are Wrong

4.25.00
A Turning Point On Abortion

4.24.00
The Gospel According to Planned Parenthood

4.24.00
The Goon with the Gun

5/08/00 3:35 p.m.
Welcome to the Real World
On campus, words of un-wisdom.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NR associate editor----------lopezk@nationalreview.com

y the time graduation day rolls around, of course, the damage has long been done. Four years of coed dorms, free condoms, Gay Pride Weeks, Take Back the Night Rallies, and all-around liberal indoctrination doesn’t often leave many college seniors with a shred of innocence (never mind a well-rounded classical education). Still, just as the final icing on the cake — as if to prove to parents one last time that their hundreds of thousands of dollars was a worthwhile PC investment — there is the commencement speech.

Fortunately, most college seniors couldn’t care less who their commencement speaker is — they don’t plan on listening too closely. They have myriad other things to think about by the time they are standing in the heat waiting to leave campus one last time, rather than listen to the often inane or downright silly platitudes of Chicken Soup-style inspiration from the school’s chosen celeb speaker.

The list is still coming in for this year’s winning line-up. But as is typical, commencement day promises to be a treat in oh, so many of the places you’ll go. Most notably, of course, there is Antioch College’s commencement speaker, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who spoke two weekends ago (via audiotape, since he is a convicted murderer — a cop-killer — on death row in Pennsylvania. Of course, by the time a student reaches his fourth year at Antioch — a school where, among many, many other things, there is an official handbook issued to students explaining the different stages of sex, graphically defining at which points a date rape may occur — there’s probably little hope that he’d be outraged by a pep talk from a murderer.

But take your pick. Children’s Defense Fund head — and long-time friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton — Marian Wright Edelman has a heavy schedule this month, speaking at Goucher College, the University of Oregon, and the Catholic Duquesne University, undoubtedly advising idealistic young activists that playing the child card is the key to winning every debate. Sen. Ted Kennedy will speak at Massachusetts’s Bentley College next weekend, Clinton media defenders CNN’s Greta Van Susteren at the (again, Catholic) Rosemont College and Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift at Fitchburg State College in Mass. Rev. Tony Campolo, post-Monica spiritual adviser to Bill Clinton will speak at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. Oprah Winfrey will impart wisdom to graduating students at both North Carolina’s Salem College and Chicago’s Roosevelt University. Gore alpha-male adviser Naomi Wolf is booked at Claremont’s Scripps College, Jesse Jackson at Mount St. Clare College in Iowa, NAACP president (and former Democratic congressman) Kweisi Mfume at the University of Maryland, and NAACP chairman Julian Bond at Missouri’s Washington University. And the list goes on, and is still growing.

A book can be written on the inappropriate speakers at Catholic schools alone. Fresh from a decision, ten years in the making, by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to renew commitment to that which makes Catholic higher education distinctive, many commencement speakers show the very opposite commitments, as the Virginia-based Cardinal Newman Society for the Preservation of Catholic Higher Education has pointed out.

You have to wonder what administrators are thinking when they send out speaking invitations. St. Mary College in Kansas succumbed to pressure and withdrew its invitation to Kansas City Star columnist Bill Tammeus who wrote the paper’s editorial on priests and AIDS, an accouterment to a "reporting" series that was subsequently successfully discredited in the mainstream, secular press. At least they changed their mind; no such luck at other Catholic schools. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is scheduled to speak at the University of Notre Dame. Under his watch, population-control efforts have increased and he has adamantly resisted efforts to avoid the use of U.S. funds on abortions. Sen. Patrick Leahy will deliver the commencement address at his alma mater, St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont — this despite his staunchly pro-choice voting record, which includes opposition to a federal ban on partial-birth abortion. Commencement at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., will feature ABC News medical editor Timothy Johnson. He’s expressed his support for both abortion and physician-assisted suicide. In reporting on the FDA’s quick approval of the first "morning-after kit" he described the move as a "courageous political action" and dismissed concerns that the pill acted to destroy fertilized eggs as a "red herring." (Holy Cross students should, perhaps, be thankful. Only months ago the school sponsored rapper Chuck D from the notorious Public Enemy, who were anti-police before it was cool, on campus for Black History Month.) And then there’s Janet Reno speaking at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia next Saturday.

If you can’t make any of these many inspirational addresses, you can read the book. It doesn’t mean to be, but a new book Onward: Twenty-Five Years of Advice, Exhortation, and Inspiration from America’s Best Commencement Speeches could have been published by the Young America’s Foundation — only under a different subtitle. Gerald Ford, Vernon Jordan, Elizabeth Drew, Alan Alda, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Holtzman, Mario Cuomo, Dan Rather, Jane Alexander, Ellen Goodman, Johnnetta Cole (the Clinton administration’s first choice for Education secretary, whose support for Castro and Communism in general kept her from ever becoming a Cabinet member), Wendy Wasserstein, Patricia Schroeder, Gloria Steinem, Mark Shields, Bill Bradley — need I go on?

Reading Onward I couldn’t help but be grateful that I missed my own undergraduate commencement not so long ago. Although, perhaps my life will never be quite right, because I missed words of wisdom from comedian Bob Newhart.

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