Activist Wants Political Bias Barred from Commencement
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
June 29, 2004
(AgapePress) - A study reveals that the nation's top 100 colleges and universities are still overwhelmingly choosing liberal speakers for their graduation ceremonies.For the 11th year in a row, the annual study by the Young America's Foundation shows very few college campuses invited conservatives, especially media personalities, to speak at commencement exercises. Out of the 200 schools surveyed, only Hillsdale College in Michigan decided to host a conservative speaker from outside the government or the military.
According to YAF's Roger Custer, several former Clinton Administration officials were included in this year's roster of commencement speakers. He notes, "Clinton himself spoke at Cornell University, and we had Madeleine Albright at Duke University, and Vernon Jordan at Penn State -- he was one of the lawyers that stood up for Clinton during the impeachment trials."
And according to Custer, a number of other officials from the Clinton White House appear yearly at these commencement ceremonies, resulting in a sort of ideological monopoly held by the left. "We just think that really sends the wrong message to students when they're graduating," he says.
At George Washington University, president Stephen Trachtenberg exemplified his liberal views by telling graduates, "If anybody has a mortarboard, you can move your tassels from right to left -- right to left -- which is what I hope happened to your politics in the last four years."
Such comments are all too common at graduation ceremonies, Custer notes, and he insists that they do not belong there. "This is just an outrage," he says, "that the president of a university should be telling students how their politics should be, regardless of what they were studying or what their background is, at a commencement ceremony."
The intellectual freedom advocate says the remark by Trachtenberg, like all such partisan bias in commencement speaker commentary, is entirely out of place. "That really is an insult to all of the conservative students in the audience that are graduating, and that is something that really needs to be changed," Custer says.
The Young America's Foundation spokesman feels it is "a real disservice" to students to prevent them from hearing a balanced variety of ideas at graduation. Last year he represented YAF on a panel about liberal bias on college campuses at the 30th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Custer is a graduate of Ithaca College in New York, where he majored in political science and was involved in conservative political activism. He also led a campaign for intellectual diversity on that campus and received a Ronald Reagan Future Leaders Scholarship from the Phillips Foundation for his efforts.
