Monday, June 02, 2014

Nerd News: Disappearing Conservative Commencement Speakers

So we've managed to over-politicize graduation ceremonies as we've over-politicized everything else. The worst of it might not even be schools' increasing habit of only inviting speakers whose views their people personally share - it's that students and faculty have developed (like a rash) the nasty tendency to protest and pitch fits and refuse to hear speakers who hold different views.  The Condi Rice debacle at Rutgers is only the latest incident.  The obvious desire to be cocooned in a world in which you never encounter a divergent idea is as appalling as the utter lack of understanding that your view is not the only one that might be held by reasonable people of good will.

2 comments:

Eric said...

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

Marx:
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.

The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."

Mad Minerva said...

Rather Antonio Gramsci too ...