STRAIGHT TALK: Ashe Schow: 2015 commencement speakers step away from preferred narratives.
Actor Matthew McConaughey (“alright, alright, alright”) had probably the best line of the season. He may not have intentionally decided to take on “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” — code words invented to explain why college students can’t handle reading or hearing things that challenge their worldviews — but he did.
“Life’s not fair,” McConaughey told University of Houston graduates last Friday. “It never was, isn’t now and won’t ever be. Do not fall into the entitled trap of feeling like you’re a victim. You are not.”
Although some students were unhappy that McConaughey was paid $135,000 for his speech, his message was probably worth the price. He offered a corrective for the seemingly endless stream of stories about the fragility of college students. (The latest example comes from a Columbia University student who thinks Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is offensive.)
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stepped away from the Obama administration’s preferred narrative that all is well in the world, that violent extremism is “on the run” and that only tepid responses to terror are necessary.
“The world’s a mess,” Albright told students at Tufts University. Before that she spoke of “rising sectarianism and extremism in the Middle East,” income inequality and how “technology has given new destructive tools to groups who use religion as a license to murder, as if God’s commandment were ‘thou shalt kill.'”
Some of what she said — income inequality, climate change and the “assumptions” of past generations — are among President Obama’s favorite talking points. But her central message – that the “world’s a mess” – is not so much. Obama seems to prefer making Americans think the true mess is at home. Albright cheered the U.S. as the “brightest beacon of human liberty,” and she managed to do it without the “but” that so often follows when Obama says such things.
Then there was English novelist Ian McEwan, who admonished Dickinson College students to defend free speech. He specifically mentioned Charlie Hebdo and the boycott from PEN America.
“There’s a phenomenon in intellectual life that I call bipolar thinking,” he said. “Let’s not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re endorsing George Bush’s ‘war on terror’. This is a suffocating form of intellectual tribalism and a poor way of thinking for yourself. As a German novelist friend wrote to me in anguish about the PEN affair — ‘It’s the Seventies again: Let’s not support the Russian dissidents, because it would get applause from the wrong side.’ That terrible phrase.”
McEwan went on to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who now speaks out about what she sees as the dangers inherent in that religion. Last year, Brandeis University withdrew an invitation to Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree after complaints by her opponents.
“Campus intolerance of inconvenient speakers is hardly new,” McEwan said.
No, but it seems to be getting worse.