Predictable Commencement Addresses Cap Off College Indoctrination

In June, what comes to your mind? Weddings. Vacations (and how to pay for record high gas prices if you’re driving). Graduations.

In the past, commencement speeches for major universities spoke about America, its values, and what future graduates might expect. These speeches have served as a political apogee for the progressive ideas they were taught in class and through textbooks.

The year was no exception. Although some speakers may be conservatives or Republicans, they are almost always liberal and advocate activist causes.

Here are just a few examples from a long list.

Augustana College: Dick Durbin (D-Ill). Bard College: Deb HALAND, Secretary of Interior. Brandeis University – Deval Patrick was the former governor of Massachusetts. Clark University: Mary Frances Berry (civil rights activist). Harvard Law School: Loretta Lynch, former U.S. Attorney General.

You can Google many other things, but this is the main point. Most major universities, while giving lip service to “diversity,” don’t believe in diversity of opinion.

Perhaps the most troubling of this June’s commencement addresses was not just the main speaker at Harvard’s Law School commencement, but a prominent and soon-to-be powerful and influential person who attended.

The main speaker was New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose preferred topic appeared to be “LGBTQ-plus.” She bragged that her deputy is an “openly gay man.” She also touted her country’s approval of same-sex marriage and its progress on “climate change.” This presumably is supposed to inspire graduates to embrace her views, if they don’t already share them. Why wouldn’t they after what they’ve been taught, watched what is promoted in the media, and endured the peer pressure of like-minded students?

Among those attending the ceremony was Supreme Court justice-designate Kentanji Brown Jackson. When Prime Minister Ardern reached the part in her address in which she referenced New Zealand’s ban on “military-style semi-automatics and assault rifles,” Jackson applauded.

The Supreme Court could be called upon to address this matter as Congress discusses whether or not weapons are banned. Jackson was wrong to appear to pre-telegraph Jackson’s opinions. Notice how the justices never applaud at a president’s State of the Union Address. That should be Jackson’s model.

What a contrast between Ardern’s remarks and another commencement address delivered at Harvard on June 8, 1978 by Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His speech drew the ire of some faculty and The New York Times editorial page, because it didn’t fit in with their ideological perspectives.

While Solzhenitsyn called Western systems “best,” he indicted the West for its lack of courage: “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. In each country, every government and in all political parties of the Western world, civil courage has declined. The decline of courage in the ruling and intellectual classes is especially evident, creating a feeling of hopelessness throughout society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”

He added: “Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

Solzhenitsyn was an modern prophet. Recent commencement speeches were filled with speakers who are less prophetic than they are prophetic.