Students Protest Mean-Spirited Commencement Speaker

The Tea Parties showed how conservative and libertarians could use new media to organize and promote their ideas. Now, Glenn provides us with an example of how conservative students are using the web to protest their school’s choice of a mean-spirited partisan to deliver a commencement address:

About 130 American University students have signed an online petition of sorts asking the school’s administration to withdraw an invitation to Barney Frank, who is slated to deliver a commencement address at AU’s School of Public Affairs in a few weeks.

It seems these students are smart enough to read beyond the headlines and the MSM coverage of the financial meltdown.  They know that Republican politics and corporate greed did not cause the collapse, writing on their Facebook page

As young Americans across the country continue to lose their jobs and “rising” college graduates struggle to find employment post-grad, should American University honestly be honoring a man who helped lead us and the world into a global economic meltdown?

In addition, Frank is excessively partisan and notoriously divisive during times when compromise and bipartisanship is needed the most.

Well said.

While I believe Mr. Frank has a right to speak on a university campus should the school, one of its departments or student groups, invite him, I wonder at the school’s choice of such a partisan figure to speak at a commencement celebration.

Whatever the result of their online petition, we have an example conservative students are using the web to make their concerns known.  Let us hope that this is the harbinger of more challenges to the biases in American academia.

I believe that Barney has been so nasty toward his critics, in large part because he has, over the years, escaped criticism for and censure of his mean-spirited attacks.  The MSM has fawned all over him and refused to hold him account not just for his angry rhetoric but also for policy mistakes.

With the new media, we can bypass the gatekeepers who once blocked criticism of this unhappy man from appearing in print, and hold his rhetoric and his record up to scrutiny.  Just as these students at American University are doing.  Kudos to these young people.  May the right learn from their example.