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May 28, 2007
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How not to do it
There are respectable ways to make your political opinions known. Disrupting a graduation ceremony is not one of them.
AMHERST, Mass. (AP) -- President Bush's former chief of staff Andrew Card was loudly booed by hundreds of students and faculty members as he rose to accept an honorary degree at the University of Massachusetts on Friday.The boos and catcalls - including those from faculty members who stood onstage with Card - drowned out Provost Charlena Seymour's remarks as she awarded the honorary doctorate in public service. Protesters claim Card lied to the American people in the early days of the Iraq war and should not have been honored at the graduate student commencement.
Card smiled slightly while Seymour spoke and raised his hand in thanks, then sat down without speaking.
Afterward he ignored a reporter's question about the protesters. "It was a great honor and a privilege to be here," he said.
The protests were mainly contained to an area in the back of the campus arena, though many of the faculty members onstage joined the three- to four- minute outburst.
One faculty member onstage held a sign: "Card - no honor, no degree." Another sign said, "War criminals go home."
With role models like these, it's hard to expect more from students.
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Comments:
Sorry, but it's equally as offensive to those who actually worked for their degrees to have to suffer through a politically-motivated honorary degree ceremony. One could argue that the graduation was disrupted by the sheer nerve of awarding someone like Card a degree alongside those who did the hard work of earning a degree. Why should the students or faculty have to sit silent while their own graduation ceremony was turned into a bread-and-circus political theatre? Why *not* return theatrics with theatrics?
"Linval",
Does this principle apply to those who have had to sit through the award of honorary degrees to the likes of Anna Quindlen, Chris Hedges, or Mary Frances Berry?
Sure does.
"Equally Offensive"? Oh please. They were insulting the recipient, and were ruining the ceremony for everyone else. And no it is not the same thing as those who sit through the award of honorary degrees to Anna Quindlen, Chris Hedges, Mary Frances Berry and the like. The people who sit throught that have the manners not to insult the recipient, and not to turn the ceremony into a vehicle to transmit their political message.
What I find most interesting is the blank assertion that ex-Chief of Staff Card is a "war criminal".
Even if we take their claims of "lying to the American people" as true, that's just not a war crime by any definition of the term in common (or even uncommon) use.
It's bad enough to be vastly impolite in a blinkered partisan manner... but to be wrong even by your own assumptions (or to simply redefine the terms), that's almost astounding. I say almost, because it's actually not uncommon, even if it should be.
Actually, Sigvald, one of the crimes with which the defendants of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (the famous "Nuremberg War Crimes Trial" of the top surviving Nazis) were charged was "conspiracy to wage aggressive war." Following the leaking of the Downing Street memos and lots of other information now available in the mass media, it's not entirely implausible to argue that members of the current administration were engaged in exactly that sort of activity in 2002-3.
