Comments on: Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax–and Commencement Speakers

By: Nord

Nord — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 18:14:57 +0000

http://www.smith.edu/about_commencement.php

Smith College has a number of speakers that make Lagarde look like a Nobel laureate.

“repeated requests to the administration for more information were explicitly and repeatedly ignored”

More information? I think Tim’s point is there have been over 100 years of speakers at Smith, it has been over 25 years since a man has spoken. If you had questions about the process of selecting a speaker for graduation, you’ve had lots of time to think about that. It is the outcome a vocal minority of Smithies didn’t like. So they managed to get Lagarde axed. Even though, outside of US universities, the IMF and World Bank are wide supported and credited with doing more to ameliorate poverty than anything to come out of the Kennedy School …

By: Ruby

Ruby — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:46:43 +0000

Dear Professor Burke,
I’ve read your work as part of my History major, in which I’ve paid particular attention to African women’s history, at Smith. I think you’ve made a very thoughtful critique of the assumptions and rhetoric about what free speech and the particular kinds of it that colleges–administrators, faculty, and students–should and do apply to commencement addresses. With due respect, I think that you have failed to do what you consider central issue with protests against Lagarde’s invitation to speak; that protesters failed to see specific, intimate, careful awareness and respect for multiple perspectives as the basis of academic freedom and rights to governance. (I think that that’s what you mean, anyway.) I contest that the vast, vast majority of students who protested Lagarde’s invitation had participated in and tried to start careful, intimate debates since the invitation was announced. Individually and in groups, we repeatedly emailed President McCartney, spoke with classmates, housemates (people sharing dorms, but the culture is more intimate, more committed), professors, and friends about Lagarde–not only about whether, why, and how much we could admire her, but also to discuss how the choice of commencement speaker might relate to that. From my perspective and from friends I have spoken to, on both ‘sides’ of the debate on whether Lagarde is an admirable person and on both ‘sides’ of the debate on whether we should have protested her invitation, the MAIN questions that have been asked were “who decided this and how” and “how can we talk about commencement speaker choices in the future, become better informed, more effectively give input, and be listened to”. It seems to me and others that I’ve spoken with that the majority of proponents for Lagarde’s disinvitation organized gatherings and sit-ins on the President’s lawn, call-a thons to Lagarde, and other more emphatic means of protests BECAUSE repeated requests to the administration for more information were explicitly and repeatedly ignored, with one student/administration meeting climaxing in a dean scolding students that they wouldn’t have a problem if Lagarde were of color.
Others have written on their perspectives with particular sensitivity to the global and historical social contexts of the protests, including a blog post on how the administration has devalued minority opinions (http://this-reading-by-lightning.tumblr.com/post/85555274165/what-i-sent-to-the-president-of-smith), characterized the protesters’ concerns as invalid through racist imagery (http://neccesaree.tumblr.com/post/86357167186/the-racialized-backlash-against-protestors-at-smith), and an acknowledgement of the determined thoughtfulness that drove the protests (http://mobile.gazettenet.com/search/11984551-108/ginetta-eb-candelario-dont-blame-smith-students-for-raising-imf-issue). I suggest that, to write responsibly, respectfully, and intimately of Smith students in the future, you more mindfully engage with what they actually thought and did.

By: mch

mch — Sun, 08 Jun 2014 21:48:33 +0000

Well, our somewhat controversial speaker spoke today. I never would have chosen him, as I think my last comment implied. He gave one of the best commencement addresses I have ever heard — and my reaction conforms to the general consensus. Just thought I should share this.

By: mch

mch — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 05:54:40 +0000

Something is awry or missing in your analysis. I’m not sure what. Perhaps your assumption that faculty or students have any significant input at all into commencement speakers? Certainly not where I teach, at a college not so different from Swarthmore or Smith. At least in recent years, the trustees seem to decide all on their own who will be the speaker — someone the trustees want to please for their own reasons (of business, of political influence, of flash as they understand flash). It’s not easy to challenge these trustees — they are very smart, very accomplished people who give their all to their alma mater, they really do. Which makes it all the more painful to challenge them. But they do need challenging. Have we stopped being their teachers? I wish that “the process” provided a way to challenge them before the announcement appeared in the college newspaper in March….
Meanwhile, I look forward to the other events at commencement, where I will meet my students’ parents and get to tell them (with heartfelt enthusiasm) how wonderful their children are, how I will miss them in my classes, in my office…. It is, indeed, all about the students who are graduating, which is why the lack of imagination in commencement speakers (all these “economic” and “world” “leaders” — who need to be paid?!?) is so depressing.

By: DCA

DCA — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 20:25:13 +0000

The problem with “allowed to protest commencement speakers” is that this allows an occasion that is really meant as a celebration of the graduates, for themselves and their parents, to be (potentially) disrupted — and to what end? There are settings in which it is useful to agree that “free speech for all” is not really appropriate, and I’d argue that a commencement, which looks like an academic activity but is really a social occasion, falls into this category. Of course, this is an argument for not having commencement speakers at all (aside from local faculty who can congratulate the graduates) — which would be fine by me, though perhaps too big a disruption to be considered.

All that said, I completely agree with your points about process and governance. Anyone in the academy knows people whose committee service becomes very light because they cannot compromise on anything.

By: lemmy caution

lemmy caution — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 17:50:02 +0000

If people want to protest commencement speakers, they should be allowed to protest commencement speakers. I don’t see the problem with that. It is annoying to be protested against, and it is annoying when your picks are protested against; but, free speech is always a little annoying.

By: gruff

gruff — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 17:50:07 +0000

It is not that there aren’t distinctions to be made, but that making fine-grained distinctions and saying, “It’s an academic thing, you wouldn’t understand” is a sure way to appear as hypocrites who don’t understand the value of the right they’re defending if we’re talking to already hostile publics who can be fired at whim for seeming to criticize the choice of pastries at the morning office meeting.

As a working person I cannot emphasize how accurate this is. Academia’s internal squabbles are seen as petty, elitist, and utterly irrelevant to the lives most people lead. This country desperately needs the intelligentsia to start genuinely caring about the poor and working people – *all* of them, not just a handful of fashionable subsets.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 31 May 2014 12:35:17 +0000

We’ll check to see if it actually works is fine–I would actually support some version of that.

“We’ll make a system for checking to see if it actually works that will funnel more money to rich institutions and rich people, that says that education is only proportoinally as good as the money it helps you to make, that dumps a massive new administrative burden on higher education, and that has all sorts of perverse incentives stuck into it”, not so fine.

By: CarlD

CarlD — Sat, 31 May 2014 06:05:54 +0000

My place is in a military town, with a military constituency. And the business school pays the rest of the bills. So I’ve come to your way of thinking through the forced reflection of serial self-defense, listening to one after another dingy functionary or chirpy shill for institutions I find deeply problematic but that make my professional life possible.

From that perspective, when you say “[m]any of my colleagues across higher education seem frustratingly oblivious to the degree of popular as well as political ill-will towards the academy and its prerogatives, or are accustomed to thinking of that ill-will as entirely an ideological product of conservative politics. I don’t think the Obama Administration’s ghastly, destructive current policy initiatives aimed at higher education would be a part of his lame-duck agenda if his team didn’t perceive higher education as a politically advantageous target,” I agree with the first part but think you may not be all in on the insight. From what I’m seeing, Obama is strategizing a holding action against the massive tide of resentment, disillusionment, and fatigue that the oversell of education has produced over the last couple generations. I agree there’s probably a more positive way to rebrand the product, but ‘ok, we’ll start checking to see if it actually works’ isn’t just a sellout.

By: Matt_L

Matt_L — Fri, 30 May 2014 02:44:23 +0000

“If your idea, as a faculty member, of faculty governance is that the one person who says, “I don’t like X” should override a committee and a process and an entire faculty, then guess what, we deserve to lose the fight for governance. If your idea of faculty governance is that you demand the outcomes you wanted in the first place after the meeting is done, and think it’s ok to rock the casbah to get there, then we deserve to lose the fight for governance.”

– Yes, I see this behavior at my institution. It is the old Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth model of faculty governance . One aristo can shout veto and the whole thing grinds to a halt.