Educating the next Elle Woods? Three of the speakers at the Claremont Colleges are entertainers. Although I love Bill Nye, I have to ask myself why three of the colleges decided to go with entertainers this year. How does the screenwriter for Legally Blonde capture women's empowerment?
What is the point of a commencement speaker? To entertain or to educate? To encapsulate an education or to put the colleges' names in the newspaper?
Well, it did just that, but alas, it was only a local paper.
From today's Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:
Graduating seniors from three of Claremont's private undergraduate colleges donned caps and gowns Sunday for their respective schools' commencement ceremonies.Pomona College's 380 graduates were addressed at commencement by Alex Gibney, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker.
TV personality "Bill Nye the Science Guy" addressed the 176 graduating seniors at Harvey Mudd College.
And at Scripps College, 186 graduates at the all-female school were addressed by Kirsten Smith, a screenwriter whose credits include "Legally Blonde."
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5 comments:
I have to vote for entertaining. By the time you get that cap and gown, you should be educated already. The graduation ceremony should be a time of refelction, sure, but you don't need another lecture. Ten minutes of stand-up comdedy is much better than forty minutes of platitudes.
I personally demand that my commencement speech teach me 4 years of humanities, 3 years of hard sciences, 3 of math, and a variety of electives at my discretion.
Anything less is a waste of half an hour.
At CMC, we got 40 minutes of platitudes. Bill Nye would have been way cooler.
But that said, Charles is right that there can be speakers who put the task ahead in good perspective and who can talk about important things.
I'm betting a Clarence Thomas could do the job justice.
Do we get any say in who speaks at our graduation ceremony at CMC?
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