The Fighting Geoducks of Evergreen State College invited Abu-Jamal, a convicted cop killer, to address graduates. Apparently, no higher education is complete without instruction by a prominent criminal. The decision at least had the virtue of getting the college national attention. It was certainly cheaper than supporting a NCAA Division I basketball team.
In Calvert County Maryland a graduation crowd stuck a finger in the eye of the Maryland Branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU-MD). The ACLU-MD obtained a court order preventing a student group, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, from delivering an invocation that would mention God five times. Instead, the crowd, lead by students, recited a prayer out loud. The ACLU-MD will not soon recover.
Most colleges and high schools managed to muddle through graduation without having to choose between God and cop killers. The allure of summer vacation and the realization college graduates might need to look for jobs tend to overwhelm other distractions.
Early this academic year, we were treated by the Alice-in-Wonderland political landscape of Boston College. Mary Daly, an aging but still fiery radical feminist, refused to allow men in her "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course. Should we add "Feminist Ethics" to our list of oxymorons?
Apparently, Professor Daly was concerned that petals of the delicate flowers, known as Boston College co-eds, would droop under the wilting pressure debates about feminism with men. Perhaps she overestimates how seriously people take her course.
As usual Harvard wins the award for the most peculiar incident at American colleges this year. Robert Thiemann, Dean of Havard Divinity School (Harvard and Divinity are two words that deserve a divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences) was asked to resign. Apparently Thiemann's mistake was to want a bigger hard drive on his computer. When Harvard techies came to upgrade his system, they noticed, while transferring files from the old disk to the new one, that Thiemann's disk was cluttered with pictures of - be still my heart - naked women.
Thiemann is a Lutheran minister. One might have expected that the Lutheran Church would have disciplined Thiemann for embarrassing behavior. However, the church just chalked it up as private behavior and ignored it. Feminists, by contrast, insisted upon Thiemann's resignation. No suggestion has ever been made that Thiemann acted improperly towards anyone. By all accounts he has been a faithful husband. But the thought police on Harvard's campus find it necessary to guard against the possibility that, while alone, someone might be in an exploitive frame of mind.
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