The Not-Welcome Sign

I'm a free-speech guy.

Just wanted to make that clear up front.

So I'm perturbed, if I can use that word, at some of these college protests against high-profile commencement speakers.

I mean, if someone like John McCain comes to your school--even if you strongly disagree with everything he stands for--why not listen to what he has to say, instead of trying to block him from stepping foot on your campus?

Sure, the students who do that, or wave signs, or heckle, or otherwise protest such appearances, are expressing their free-speech rights as well. But what message are they sending? We feel so strongly about our views that we simply refuse to listen to anyone else ?

There's an interesting debate flourishing over the issue, starting with National Review Editor Rich Lowry :

"What a bargain: At a cost of a mere $100,000 or so, a northeastern college can take your child and transform him into a delicate flower incapable of handling opinions at odds with his own. It can close his mind and vacuum-seal it against opposing views. And it can, as a bonus, perhaps make him rude and incorrigible.

"These have been the benefits of liberal education on display this commencement season, as graduating students have risen up against the affront of having to listen to the U.S. secretary of State or a distinguished war hero for a half-hour or so. Students complain that Condoleezza Rice and Sen. John McCain don't represent them. But since when has it been a requirement that speakers on campus be representative of--in the sense of totally agreeing with--student views? If there were such a requirement, few commencement addresses would ever be given by anyone to the right of filmmaker Michael Moore.

"Students at the liberal New School in New York City circulated a petition to have McCain disinvited as the commencement speaker. 'McCain does not speak for me,' they declared. Well, of course not. No one would ever mistake the (mostly) conservative senator from Arizona as a mouthpiece for the flagrantly tattooed and pierced left-wingers who attend the Greenwich Village college. But why would they only want to hear someone saying things that they already thought and believed?. . .

"All the rhetoric about 'not speaking for me' and 'not in my name' indicates a certain self-obsession. At the New School it was in full flower. As McCain spoke about the lessons of his life, students yelled, 'It's not about you!' and 'It's about my life, not yours!' Apparently what they wanted to hear was: 'I'm here to tell you that every unexamined prejudice you hold is absolutely correct. You represent the summit of human wisdom, and in all the years you have left on this Earth, you will never learn anything important that you don't already know as a snotty 21-year-old.' "

The Wall Street Journal editorial page also disapproves:

"Rude college kids and left-wing professors are hardly a new story. But the ugliness of the New School crowd toward Mr. McCain reveals the peculiar rage that now animates so many on the political left. Dozens of faculty and students turned their back on the Senator, others booed and heckled, and a senior invited to speak threw out her prepared remarks and mocked their invited guest as he sat nearby. Some 1,200 had signed petitions asking that Mr. McCain be disinvited."