More Thoughts on UVU Graduation

I've received strong responses to the previous post, pretty well divided between agreement and disagreement. The disagreements are especially welcome, since they highlight important points.

There are two basic complaints:

1. That any speaker for graduation, whether he be the Mormon businessman or whether she be Mother Teresa, would naturally speak from personal experience and that shouldn't be offensive to the audience. Even if Muhammad himself were to speak, wrote one reader, I wouldn't be offended.

2. That I have misrepresented Mr. Gay's speech.

Here's the problem, at least for me, most basically:

If a prominent outsider were to come challenge the majority of us at UVU with his or her thoughts, it would be good for us.

But I'm not convinced that a graduation ceremony is the right place for that.

If Michael Moore, for instance, had been the speaker, and if he had politicized our graduation, it would have take away from the broad sense that all of us, even with our differences, are celebrating our graduations -- all of our graduations.

So I'm all for Michael Moore or Robert Gay or George Bush or Bill Clinton speaking on campus for the School of Business or for the History/Political Science Department. We ought to welcome challenge from many sides.

In this case, it was not a prominent outsider, but an insider who spoke and whose examples, like the testimony meeting example and the African mission-president examples, were drawn from the experiences of the majority.

There's no problem with that in many university settings. If my brother in law, who is a millionaire businessman and now a general authority of the LDS church were to speak about his experiences in either realm to an audience of religious studies and/or business students, it would be a wonderful experience.

But graduation is for all of us, not just for Mormons and not just for capitalists.

My mother taught elementary school in Utah Valley and, despite the legal separation of church and state, started her class with prayer until she retired. I asked her what the children thought and felt who weren't religious, or who weren't Christian, or who weren't Mormon like most of the students. That's not my problem, she said. We're the majority and the minority should not tell us what to do.

I obviously disagree. How the majority treats the minority is a good sign of whether a society will be a civil society.

If Mr. Gay had thought more carefully about his audience, or if he had cared about those in the audience who weren't religious or who were religious in a different way, he would have showed them more respect by giving a less religiously partisan, less politically partisan speech.

As for misrepresenting the speech, I wrote nothing that he didn't actually say. He did denounce Harvard liberals. He did denounce abortion, drawing applause as in a political rally. He did say that if we knew Africa we knew what would happen to the little boy when he went home without money. He did say Africans didn't know the value of service but that they learned it when they went with the Eagle Scout. He did warn us against the evils of a secular society.

And yes, he did say lots of decent things I didn't mention. In that sense, I misrepresented the speech. I also referred to his tears and to him as a simpering millionaire. Those were probably cheap shots; but they grew out of the knowledge that with Mitt Romney and others at Bain Capital Mr. Gay engaged in a particularly odious kind of capitalism, one which produces nothing (no energy, no buildings, no vegetables, no clothing, etc.) but profits. Just one example from the Boston Globe:

Bain Capital put $5 million into its purchase of American Pad & Paper and quickly began charging management and other fees. It also made payments to investors. In all, Bain and its investors reaped more than $100 million even though Ampad went into bankruptcy, workers lost jobs, and stockholders were left with worthless shares. [And creditors got less than 50 cents on the dollar.] 

White and Delightsome

Graduation yesterday at Utah Valley University. Although I skipped my own graduation ceremonies, figuring that what I had learned was enough for me, I have enjoyed attending the graduations of my own students, pleased to get to shake their hands and congratulate them and celebrate their hard work and accomplishment.

This graduation was one I'd been anticipating for over four years. When Najib Niazi arrived at what was then UVSC from Afghanistan, sponsored by Scott Carrier, for whom he had translated during the war, he brought me a chapan that looks a lot like the three chapans worn by the men at the left (photo from a Swedish blog). I told Najib that I would wear it when he graduated. Yesterday I wore the chapan as I lined up with my faculty colleagues in their colorful academic robes, proud of Najib and happy to see him wave and smile as he passed by the faculty with his fellow students.

The morning was spoiled by the graduation speech given by teary-eyed Dr. Robert C. Gay, CEO of Huntsman Gay Global Capital (and former colleague of Mitt Romney in Bain Capital).

We (and by we I mean the Atheists and Methodists and Muslims and Mormons and Buddhists and Catholics and so many others at our state University) were assaulted by a simpering millionaire who intimated that Africans do not treat children charitably and that they know nothing about service unless they are taught by the millionaire Mormon's Eagle Scout son. He said that the deviations of a secular world will lead us astray, that pitiful liberals at Harvard censored the printed version of Mother Teresa's commencement address about abortion as murder, that Jesus is the way.

I squirmed and cursed and wrote pointed obscenities in my notebook as I thought about Najib and his Muslim friends and family-to-be who were sitting in the audience.

While Mr. Gay pretended to be Mother Teresa, they sat there dumbfounded.

As did I.

Najib, please accept my heartfelt apology. Najib, this celebrated man, this captain of capitalism, this philanthropic Mormon, this man of power and wealth -- this man is simply uneducated.

Take your honors B.S. in Business, take your MBA, if that's what you choose, take the fine education that you already have, and make more of it than this man has. Huck Finn, whom you met and wrote about in the class with me and Alex and Scott, is a much finer model for a good life.

While you do that, charitable man that you are, I'll look into the world through the less charitable face of the man to the right of the photo and think angrily about the man who brought his shameful disrespect into our celebration.