by Joe Jablonski, Jr.

As graduation season rolls around once again, the ranks of commencement speakers at universities across America continue to be dominated by those left of the political center, including former Clinton administration officials, Hollywood progressives, and liberal media pundits.

From Southern Poverty Law Center founder Morris Dees (Rice, DePaul) to left-wing writer Toni Morrison (Smith) to welfare rights advocate Marian Wright Edelman (Tulane), colleges and universities have looked to the far left of the political spectrum to find graduation day speakers. A check of the commencement speakers at the top colleges and universities reveals that conservative speakers have been almost entirely shut out.

"For the fifth year in a row our most prestigious schools excluded scholars like Milton Friedman, Walter Williams, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas for the likes of left-wing activists Morris Dees, Marian Wright Edelman, Janet Reno, and Hillary Clinton," noted Ron Robinson, president of Young America's Foundation, which for the past five years has released a report on commencement day bias.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, now U.S. Senator from New York, will be honored at Yale this year. Some Yale students are planning to protest her commencement speech. Hillary follows Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who spoke at Yale last year, Clinton Presidential Advisor David Gergen in 1999, and NBC anchor Tom Brokaw in 1998.

Despite the scandals, President Bill Clinton has remained very popular among college and university administrators. Last year Bill Clinton spoke at no less than three commencement exercises, Carleton College, Coast Guard Academy, and Eastern Michigan University. In 1999, Clinton spoke at the University of Chicago (which usually invites commencement speakers from within the university), and in 1998, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Young America's Foundation has reported that in 1996 over one hundred schools requested Bill Clinton as their commencement speaker. Of those hundred Clinton accepted three invitations, including two, at Penn State and Princeton, in the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, then politically important in his 1996 reelection prospects.

After naming Clinton Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, as its next president, Harvard decided to invite another Clinton Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin, to speak at commencement this year. Harvard's President Neil L. Rudenstine stated that Bob Rubin "has been a rare public servant, someone who has worked in a quiet, understated, yet supremely effective way to make one of the world's most complicated and important jobs seem almost easy." Harvard's record over the last five years shows an attempt at somewhat more balance than Yale's, however. Thus, while Harvard had in 1998 UN official Mary Robinson, ex-President, Ireland, and in 1997, former Clinton Secretary of State Albright, last year it invited Amartya K. Sen, 1998 Nobel Prize winner in Economics for his work on welfare economics, and, in 1999, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Clinton's former Treasury Secretary will also be the commencement speaker at Williams College. In 2000, former Democratic Senator George Mitchell spoke at Williams, in 1998 cellist Yo-yo Ma, and in 1997, author Grace Paley, who is actively involved in anti-war, feminist, and anti-nuclear movements and who regards herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."

Clinton's former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno has accepted invitations to speak at commencement, this year at the University of California at Berkeley and at Cornell. Berkeley students sent a letter to Ms. Reno in February 2001 stating, "We admire the accomplishments you have made in your career in the judicial system, not only as attorney general, but also in the Florida court system." Ms. Reno follows former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as last year's speaker at Berkeley, and noted liberal African-American author Terri McMillan in 1999.

Representatives of the liberal media are frequently invited to speak at commencement exercises at America's colleges and universities. CNN senior editor Garrick Utley will speak this year at Pomona College; CNN's Jeff Greenfield will speak at Bucknell, and CNN's Charlayne Hunter-Gault will speak at Duke this year. In a shocker last year, Antioch College apparently wanted to send a very special message to its graduating class by inviting former journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, now famous for killing a policeman in Philadelphia. Also speaking at the event was transsexual activist Leslie Feinberg.

There are some exceptions to the blackout of moderate to conservative speakers on graduation day. The University of Notre Dame has announced that President George W. Bush will speak at its 2001 commencement exercises on May 20. Bush will later speak at the Naval Academy in Annapolis on May 25. His mother, former First Lady, Barbara Bush, is scheduled to address the graduates of Wake Forest University on May 21, while Elizabeth Dole will speak at Meredith College this year. The University of Pennsylvania, in a break with the past, has decided to have former Vietnamese prisoner-of-war, Bush's rival, and advocate for campaign finance reform, John McCain, Republican Senator from Arizona, speak at commencement this year.

In an apparent attempt to further politicize graduation day 2001, and balkanize American students, university administrators have intentionally segregated the graduating class by race, sexual orientation and ethnicity. Columnist John Leo noted, "identity politics on the college campuses have reached their logical conclusion: separate graduation ceremonies for each identity group. Homosexuals hold their own graduations at 18 or more colleges. At the University of California at Los Angeles, the Lavender Graduation will be on June 16," where Ellen DeGeneres's mother spoke in the past. Leo further reports that the "Raza graduation" will mean separate graduation ceremonies for Latinos on June 17, just after separate graduations for Filipinos, Asian Pacific Islanders, African-Americans, Iranians, and American Indians on June 15.

University administrators appear to be intent on getting as many liberals to lecture to their graduating classes as ever, despite the non-profit status of institutions of higher learning legally bound to be non-partisan, and the abundance of conservatives with equal or greater stature as public personas, like Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Fox News personality Bill O'Reilley, among others.

"College administrators," YAF's Robinson concludes, "are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture."