Sorry, your Counterpunch is almost not worthy of responding to, a slap dash of random facts thrown together with boogie monster words, but lets take a few for fun:

“However, as Board member of the third firm, Alliance, Zoellick was party to late 1990s oversight of Alliance Capital’s investments in Enron which led to multiple fraud lawsuits and vast losses for Alliance’s clients, including the state of Florida.”

OK, Zoellick served on a board of a mutual fund company that owned stock in Enron. He had no role in selecting stocks in their mutual funds, the managers did. But let’s see – Swarthmore owned stock in Enron, so did any investor who owned an S&P 500 index mutual fund, so I suppose Robert Reich also was party to Enron’s accounting fraud – which, wait, I forgot, what does Enron have to do with Zoellick? Right, nothing.

Alliance also owned stock in Apple – can Zoellick take credit for the iPad and iPhone?

“Zoellick served as [Baker’s] main assistant in the notorious December 2000 presidential vote recount in Florida, so destructive of those last vestiges of US democracy, thanks to the open racism and right-wing bullying of Zoellick’s thugs”.

If you think open racism in 2000 destroyed the last vestiges of US democracy, I guess you think the Reagan era was the peak of US democracy, or do you go back to Kennedy when there was (but no longer today!) wide-spread disenfranchisement of citizens in the US? Considering your low view of democracy in South Africa, I am not surprised you seem skeptical of it elsewhere too.
As for South Africa, I do appreciate your work down there. Does calling the ANC corrupt, but blaming the corruption on Americans or Japanese (or BRICs) go far down there? I guess that is why democracy is better than the

My second answer, which usually ends the conversation because it’s inevitably a dead end, is that real change can–and often SHOULD–take more than a year to implement. I feel in the extreme minority as a current student who is OK with 10-year plans to fix Sharples, to fix blah blah blah that’s so terrible about Swarthmore. Could Swat’s consensus process move faster and be more efficient–probably. But I’d rather put my effort into advocating for additional long-term changes that I’d like to see happen, and doing so within the existing infrastructure.

Wrt the Zoellick debacle, I’m not on campus right now to overhear the spontaneous discussions, but I didn’t even bother reading the Facebook discussions. The whole situation exemplifies what I most dislike about activism as I’ve encountered it at Swarthmore: such-and-such is condemned as a matter of morality, of ethics, of social justice. But business and commerce–of the everyday, non-divested kind, even–is not inherently evil, and I resent being pushed to think that it is.

A commencement speaker is not held up as an unvarnished object of adulation but in Swarthmore’s tradition of favoring alumni is an example of a life lived following on a Swarthmore education, or in the case of non-alums, just an interesting life and an interesting person who can say a few things to the students as they leave here. That is a role that really has to cover a wide range of the accomplishments, careers and contributions that people might have and experiences that may come their way. You would be entitled to sit in the audience and think, “No matter what, I’m not going to live Zoellick’s life”. (And you might not be the first person in the world to be completely wrong about what you think you’re going to be doing in thirty or forty years, which is a frequent theme of commencement speeches.) But even that experience (“I’m not going to be that person”) is a valuable thing. What you are suggesting is that any student who is sitting in the audience thinking “President of the World Bank, now that would be an amazing challenge, I wonder if I could ever do that” isn’t entitled to think that, isn’t entitled to hear that, doesn’t really belong in the audience or only belongs on the condition that they understand their marginality and illegitimacy to the “real” values of the institution. Which is a complete violation of what I understand the real values of the institution to be. That student at that moment is as entitled to the possibility of hearing a person who inspires his or her aspirations as anyone else.

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I think the problem is that, by inviting Zoellick as a commencement speaker, the school is implicitly holding him up to the student body as the kind of Swarthmore graduate whom the students ought to emulate. But it seems like he is singled out for this honor because he became rich and powerful, and for that reason, I think it’s reasonable for people to balk at the invitation. What kind of accomplishment is it to become rich and powerful?

It seems to me that someone with interesting experiences but without compelling accomplishments should be invited to campus to give a talk, not to receive an honor.

I’m viewing this in part through a different prism, which is a kerfuffle we had at Oberlin a few years back over an invitation to Karl Rove, an invitation which was more or less explicitly designed by conservative students as a provocation, and which came accompanied by limits put on the usual ability of the campus to peacefully protest, and the audience to ask questions. Zoellick is a different case.

But the thing I come back to is that the logic of the concern that I’m reading is that students, unless they know they are a majority, shouldn’t protest a speaker for fear that the speaker will choose to withdraw. That doesn’t strike me as a fair expectation, and it encourages silence (don’t criticize the company or maybe it will re-locate and take our jobs to the third world!). The minority of students didn’t make a decision on Swat’s behalf; Zoellick did. If a handful of students chose to peacefully protest when Zoellick showed up, would that be so bad? As Nord says, Zoellick chose to use the protest to demonstrate the intolerance of student activists. I don’t think it had to go down this way.

One issue is that a small number of anonymous commenters with a few named students ended up being the institution’s voice and making a decision on our behalf.

Which to me is made a bit worse by what Nord points to: that at least some of them either voiced their opposition to the choice in breathtakingly sweeping terms, declaring that mere association with the World Bank or mere membership in the political leadership of the Republican Party is sufficiently malevolent to justify opposition or in terms that the opponents even conceded were exaggerated or inaccurate when challenged. “Will L”, for example, admitted that calling Zoellick a key architect of the Iraq War wasn’t accurate, but justified that on the grounds that he only had a short time to make his case and he needed something dramatic that “started the conversation”. This really bugs me: it’s anti-intellectual and really counter to the entire purpose of the institution. If the students opposing Zoellick had done even a bit of decent research, they would have found out that Tea Party conservatives were already gearing up last summer to oppose his possible appointment in a Romney Administration on the grounds that Zoellick is too associated with negotiation and diplomacy.

But it’s not really about Zoellick. I think it’s fine to criticize a person and as I’ve said, I would be critical of Zoellick and some of the institutions he’s worked with. The point is that Swarthmore has historically used commencement invitations largely to honor the accomplishments and experiences of its own alumni. The issue is, “What’s the standard that the students are proposing to set here for such an invitation?” The standard could be: no one who is at all political or has anything in their experience which could be criticized, which would disqualify most of our alumni and indeed most distinguished people in general and be boring besides. Or that standard could be, “No bankers, no Republicans, no development experts, no rich people, etc.” Which is a complete betrayal of all of our language about diversity and pluralism. Or it’s “we are not proposing a standard, we just don’t like this one invitation.” Which is incoherent. In all those cases, I’m really unhappy with something as ill-educated and ill-spirited becoming the de facto opinion of the entire community, which it has in this case.

During my time at Swat, the Swattie guy from the Nation was the speaker. While I remember being somewhat off put at his nomination, the actual speech was pretty good, like all good speakers, and certainly nothing that rubbed dirt in the noses of me and the half dozen other students who could ‘be offended’.

Unfotunately, in my day, all we had was Lexis/Nexis – today, I see too many students, sadly even Swarthmore students, using Google as a substitute for critical thinking, let alone using it to determine facts.