ith summer almost here, and the green shoots on the ground (if not on the Dow) grown to leafy fullness, the White House has completed an annual springtime chore: choosing among the many invitations from colleges and universities for the boss to address the graduating class. This year, three were accepted. On May 13th, President Obama speaks at Arizona State University, in Tempe; four days later, at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana; and, five days after that, at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland.
In recent years politicians have been given a run for their money at commencement time by anchorpersons and Hollywood celebrities, but loftily placed public officials, especially those who can be credibly deemed statesmen, are still the most sought-after speakers—and the biggest “get” of all, of course, is the President of the United States. The President is a statesman ex officio, a guaranteed publicity magnet, and a person whose fame and entourage can bathe even the roomiest campus in a glowing aura of importance. (Another plus: Presidents don’t demand speaking fees or airline tickets.) The feeling is mutual. Your statesman regards a campus backdrop and academic robes as the ideal stage set and costume for the utterance of large, grave thoughts. Winston Churchill was between prime ministerships when he delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, but he was introduced by President Truman, which made the occasion official. A year later, Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced his plan for war-ravaged Europe under the trees of Harvard Yard. In 1963, President Kennedy chose commencement at American University, in Washington, D.C., as the venue for the speech, perhaps the finest of his Presidency, in which he called for a ban on nuclear tests in the atmosphere.
If a President happens to have made himself detested—by starting or escalating a bloody, ill-conceived war, say—he is wise to limit his campus appearances to the service academies, where students and faculty alike are subject to military discipline and unlikely to be rude to a Commander-in-Chief, even one whose folly threatens their lives. But a merely unpopular President is normally a trouble-free choice—and Barack Obama is anything but unpopular, especially on campus. He’s brainy, he writes books, he’s pouring billions into education, his team bulges with professors and Nobelists (and the odd ex-president of Harvard), he follows March Madness, and his idea of a lucrative side job is teaching at a university—none of which explains why the first of his graduation-day bookings was met with a dis and the second with a Donnybrook.
As for the dis, Arizona State’s lèse-majesté was less lèse than advertised. When word got out that the invitation did not include an honorary degree, Obama did not complain. Nevertheless, awkwardness ensued. A.S.U.’s president explained that his institution no longer confers honorary degrees on “sitting politicians.” A university spokesperson unhelpfully pointed out that at A.S.U. honorary degrees are reserved for “someone who’s really outstanding, who has made outstanding contributions in their field.” Obama, whose field is being President, hasn’t been on the job long enough to qualify. On the other hand, Obama will be A.S.U.’s first outside commencement speaker in thirty years, which is a big honor right there. And the university hastened to expand its main financial-aid program and rename it the President Barack Obama Scholars Program. Despite the weather forecast—a hundred degrees and very, very sunny—an audience of sixty-five thousand is expected, Obama’s largest since Inauguration Day.
Notre Dame planned from the start to confer an honorary doctorate on Obama, as it has done for eight of his predecessors, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt. This only heightened the dudgeon of the American Catholic right. The loudest protests have been orchestrated by the Cardinal Newman Society, founded in 1993 and unconnected with the Newman Centers for Catholic students, which are a familiar sight on hundreds of campuses. The group describes itself as dedicated to strengthening “Catholic identity” at Catholic colleges and universities, “many” of which—including Notre Dame, apparently, the Gipper notwithstanding—embrace “a mistaken notion of academic freedom.” It claims to have collected three hundred and fifty thousand names on a Web petition demanding that Notre Dame rescind its invitation and “halt this travesty immediately.” Pat Buchanan chimed in, accusing Notre Dame of saying that Obama’s alleged “support for policies and programs that bring death to more than a million unborn children every year is no disqualification to being honored by a university dedicated to Our Lady who carried to term the Son of God.” And the protests are not just a fringe phenomenon. Sixty-eight American bishops—one of whom suggested that Notre Dame change its name to Northwestern Indiana Humanist University—have voiced their displeasure.
But Obama is not such an easy target. One of his first acts as President was to cancel the so-called “global gag rule,” which denied funds to overseas family-planning organizations that also offer abortion services, or even information about abortion. But because the main focus of such organizations is contraception, cutting off their funding almost certainly resulted in more (and more dangerous) abortions, not fewer (and safer) ones. The President also reversed his predecessor’s ban on funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but specified that the embryos must come from fertility clinics that would otherwise discard them. At his most recent press conference, he rejected the idea “that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations.” And he noted that his domestic-policy staff “is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp to see if we can arrive at some consensus” on ways to reduce the unwanted pregnancies that are abortion’s invariable precondition.
In any case, the controversy about Obama’s Notre Dame appearance is less about him than about divisions within the American Catholic community. Church teaching holds that abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, is an “intrinsic evil.” Contraception is an “intrinsic evil,” too (as is torture). But a Pew poll prompted by the Notre Dame flap found that more Catholics would keep abortion legal in all or most cases than would ban or restrict it, and a Gallup study found practically no difference between Catholics and non-Catholics on embryonic stem-cell research, which is “morally acceptable” to around sixty per cent of both groups. It is significant that sixty-eight bishops have protested Notre Dame’s invitation, but just as significant that hundreds have not. The real division is between social conservatives, on the one hand, and social moderates and liberals, on the other, not between Catholics and non-Catholics. But that doesn’t make it any less deep, and Obama’s approach—practical, nonideological, “pro-choice” but hardly pro-abortion—is more likely than any of the alternatives to keep it relatively civil.
Meanwhile, from the midshipmen at Annapolis, not a peep. Mercifully. ♦
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