June 09, 2005

Commencement Speaker with Conservative Views Steps Down In Face of Boycott

According to today's San Francisco Chronicle, writer Richard Rodriguez will not be speaking at California State University East Bay's commencement on Saturday, due to a threatened boycott based on his views on education.

Rodriguez is the author of Hunger of Memory, a memoir that covers his entry into Sacramento, California schools knowing just 50 words of English, and goes up to his university studies and activities in the reading room of the British Museum.

Rodriguez is known for his opposition to bilingual education and affirmative action. The following is an excerpt from an essay he wrote back in 1997:

In truth, most of us who have benefited from affirmative action over the last 25 years have been middle-class Americans, not cultural minorities. But because we come from numerical minority groups, we have been able to advance. We advanced on the backs of those less fortunate. The exclusion of others of our race or ethnic group from college made our presence within the institution important. To put the matter more plainly: because many Hispanics were absent from college, I was able to be rewarded.

To avoid controversy, Rodriguez decided to step aside, and someone else will speak in his place.

Sarah Gonzales, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at CSU agreed with the students' complaints:

"We need to teach our students to be able to listen to diverse opinions, but they also need to be able to respond," said Gonzales, who is also a school board member in Hayward. "As a commencement speaker, he gets free air time."

What, now people can't listen to opposing viewpoints if they cannot say anything to rebut them right away? Whatever happened to being polite? Students at the Columbia Business School had to listen politely to Indra Nooyi, CFO and president of Pepsico, compare America to the "middle finger" of the hand in comparison to the rest of the world. (Pepsico and Nooryi are now under fire...as well they should be.)

Colleges and universities are known for having more leftwing commencement speakers than conservative ones, and to my knowledge, they are generally not boycotted. (If you can think of any boycotts of leftwing speakers, please note them in the comments section of this post.) Ben Shapiro wrote about the phenomenon in 2004. In a nutshell, conservative students basically have to "suck up" leftwing views both while in school and at graduation.

So I find it disturbing that students at CSU East Bay can't deal with a speaker, for a half an hour or so, whose views they may not agree with. Part of college life is supposed to be learning how to act like an adult...and part of being an adult is being able to listen politely to something when the situation demands it.

Part of the problem with our politically correct world is that some people's opinions count more than others. It's a sad commentary on society.

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