Tue 2 Sep 2008
Commencement Speakers
Posted by David under Ideological Diversity, Williams History
Posted at 6:20 amRandom New York Times surfing allowed me to add the identity of the 1989 Commencement Speaker to our Wikipedia listing. But surely we can fill in some of the missing years? Note that 20% of the speakers in the last 20 years were African American (Cole, Franklin, Reagon and Davis). Wasn’t somebody complaining a few months ago about having too many white speakers?
Also, consider my claim from 5 years ago about ideological diversity among Williams Commencement Speakers.
Looking at this pessimistically, it is sad to see Williams not doing a better job of providing balance. Of course, a sample size of 10 isn’t enough to draw serious conclusions, but I don’t recall graduation speakers being too right wing in the 1980’s. A good out of sample test going forward will be to see how Williams does over the next 10 years. If they fail to invite any of the three recent Republican governors of Massachusetts or any leading Republican Senators and Cabinet Secretaries, it will probably be fair to conclude that there is as much bias at Williams as anywhere else.
Our out of sample test of five speakers shows two liberals (Friedman and Halberstam), two artists with uncertain (to me) politics (Davis and Serra) and one news anchor who votes Democratic (I think) but is largely non-political in her public persona (Couric). What are the odds that the College will have a conservative/republican speaker in the next five years? Low. If we invited former Democratic governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis for 1990, why wouldn’t we invite former Republican governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Mitt Romney for 2010? Because the people doing the inviting think that liberals/democrats are more interesting and/or honor-worthy than conservatives/republicans.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:42 am
If one believes that commencements, commencement speeches or commencement speakers are sufficiently boring or otherwise objectionable, one can easily refrain from attending - and I believe that for the most part they are, and I usually do. Afterall the College will mail the goddam useless sheepskin.
September 2nd, 2008 at 6:42 am
Ummm, didn’t George Bush speak at commencement in 1996?
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 am
umm…didn’t dukakis get a lot farther in his campaign than romney? also, doesn’t romney denigrate massachusetts citizens in his campaigning?
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:02 am
Out of your ’sample test’ of five speakers, you could identify only two as liberals. So, what exactly is your argument?
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 am
David, your usage of “conservative/Republican” as if the two words are in any way synonymous is rather disturbing.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:58 am
I say we invite Sarah Palin and she can tell us all about the evils of identity politics! LOL…
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:26 am
…it seems that we invited two B-level liberal celebrities and one A-level conservative celebrity, who was incidentally also the President. Out of a sample size of around 10, two liberals, one conservative, and seven neutral speakers seems to be about as balanced as one could ask/hope for. It’s certainly more balanced than the ideological range of the students themselves…if we were inviting speakers at rates proportional to students’ ideology, we would have roughly 7 liberals, 1 conservative, 1 libertarian, and 1 neutral speaker.
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Sam, I think the topic of Sarah Palin is off the table. But I will say, it is a contradiction that the choice Sarah and her doctor made when she spoke at the energy conference in Texas after her water broke, and the choice that her daughter is making to keep her unborn child - as commendable as that it - are choices Sarah Palin wants the government to deny all women in the United States.
It seems to me Republicans are asking for a quota system for selecting graduation speakers. Haven’t we been down this road?
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Tom Friedman is more liberal than, say, Milton Friedman, but not by much.
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:40 pm
How about Kinky Friedman?
September 2nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I second Frank’s suggestion.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 pm
As far as I am aware, we do not know who the college actually approaches to be commencement speaker. So david’s perception of “bias” on the part of the college may originate in the different acceptance rates of commencement speakerships between conservatives and liberals.
Perhaps conservatives and republicans do not value an honorary degree from an elite eastern liberal arts college as much as liberals and democrats do.
The distribution of conservative or republican elected officials is certainly skewed toward areas where the college has less perceived cache - and fewer matriculating students. Given this regionalization of the republican and democratic parties, it may be rational for the college to select speakers that will reinforce its standing in its richest recruiting grounds - which also happen to be blue states with predominantly blue elected elites (NY, MA, CA, etc).
The above ruminations are as speculative as David’s original post.
I am not sure what the discussion of Couric’s voting record (secret ballor anyone?) is supposed to indicate. Perhaps as co-conspirator of liberal media bias, we should take it on faith that she is a godless liberal.
If only we could correlate conservatives’ SAT scores with those of liberals, we could really get somewhere.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Perhaps it isn’t about politics.
Perhaps the fact that it is difficult to determine the ‘political stance’ (of, well…four of the last six whose speeches and bios I scanned), indicates that the criteria, and the decision, just might be based upon those who might inspire…and those who won’t have a tendency to look upon the honor as a chance to further a partisan view.
FWIW, that is the conclusion I came to… from scanning the speeches and bios of the last six speakers.
But, hey…this is from little ole Soph Mom, after all…so again…FWIW.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:47 am
The liberal education that I receive is precisely what I find best in our educational system. Insofar as to defining the political nomenclature of liberal vs conservative, I have no interest, in that these definitions move so adroitly so as to confuse or confine the best minds of their hard labor.
Perhaps we need to move in terms that are more convertable to common sense. I am not an epimethean and thus prefer standing awake while one consumes whatever means of conversion our facilitators present.
Potential good commencement speakers would be: President McCain, Vice-President Palin, Others could follow. We require the best to represent us. Time dictates choice.
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Palin at Williams, David? No chance. Williams doesn’t invite anti-intellectuals who fire librarians because they won’t ban books that Sarah Palin doesn’t like at the public library. Williams is all about the pursuit, rather than the suppression, of knowledge.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:53 am
Jesus, JeffZ, were you to meander out from where you find yourself, perhaps you would drift out onto the depression you find yourself in. Living n the Bronx, or Brooklyn or Queens, is not about pursuit or living. It is about survival.
New York has more anti-intellectuals than the entire planet.
The suppression of knowledge comes from New York and Washington D.C.
How astute and arcane.
If Williams College does not invite so-called anti-intellectuals, it is not because of the Trustees but of those cowards who cannot define the purpose of position and place within the etiquette of Williams College.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:54 am
As usual, tremendously astute and insightful point David. I’ll be sure to let my parents, who grew up in the Bronx only to earn graduate degrees and spend their whole lives learning and teaching, and my many friends in Brooklyn and Queens, all of whom take a reasonably fair stab at “living”, know about your enlightened views. I am sure, thanks to your insight, that they will all slink back into the cave of deepression from which they came.
I think we all saw what the GOP was about last night: a complete deficit of any ideas for governing (after all their talk about celebrity Obama, interesting which party had actually had something real to say in the last two weeks), not a single word of comment about what has actually happened in this country over the last eight years, sarcastic, snide, hypocritical insults of a candidate, his wife, his supporters, the millions of Americans who believe that change comes from the community level, including the entire civil rights movements (which was, by the way, composed of the oft-derided “community organizers”). Palin has about as much gravitas and class as a your average candidate for junior high class president. And of course, the delegates ate every word up. I’ll give her this much — she has a lot more gravitas and class than Rudy Giuliani. You can’t help but contrast the uplifting, optimistic, enthusiastic images from the democratic convention with the bile and vitriol pouring out of Minneapolis. Yes, Palin and Giuliani have absolutely fired up the base. They’ve also turned off a lot of Americans that want to know, where am I going to stand in a McCain administration?