Saturday, May 16, 2009

Commencemnts: No Conservatives!

From Fox News:
It's not enough that Democrats have command of some key real estate in Washington. This month, they've also got the ear of just about every college student in the country.
Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and White house chief of staff Rahm Emanuel all have multiple invites to be keynote speakers at graduations this spring.
And while President Obama is pulling a hat trick at Notre Dame, Arizona State and the U.S. Naval Academy, you won't see one of that last institution's most famous graduates on stage anywhere this year.
John McCain ... Sarah Palin ... Mitt Romney ... Rudy Giuliani ... they aren't on anyone's program in 2009. Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich? Persona non grata, thank you very much.So whatever happened to conservatives?
Education watchdogs say it's nothing strange for conservatives to be shunned from the academy, and that the one-sided invitations have become a permanent fixture of the ivory tower.
"The colleges have been transformed," said David Horowitz, whose organization, Students for Academic Freedom, tracks ideological bias on campus. "They're now these partisan institutions. They're not going to change."
Horowitz ran a study in 2003 that looked at commencement speakers at 32 top institutions in the U.S. for the previous 10 years. He found that liberals and Democrats were favored over conservatives by a ratio of 15-1. And then he stopped counting.
"It's permanent. It's not going to change, partly because there's so little attention being paid to it," he told FOXNews.com.

2 comments:

Bonnie Sashin said...

Dan,
As always your observations are compelling and thought-provoking. But frankly no graduate should have to be subjected to Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh (didn't Wanda Sykes recently describe him as the "20th terrorist"?)

Dan Cirucci said...

But Bonnie, I've been listening to Rush for years and surely it's done me no harm. Right?