Another day, another commencement speaker forced out because campus crybabies cannot bear to lay eyes on someone whose presence they find intolerable:

After Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde, Robert J. Birgeneau – former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley – withdrew his name from Haverford College’s commencement speech Sunday. Spokesman Chris Mills said that since the school already has three other commencement speakers, Birgeneau’s successor will not be named.

Birgeneau, who was one of the four commencement speakers and was set to receive an honorary degree, cancelled the event after concerns were raised about his actions during a 2011 UC student protest. Police used force and batons on students who were protesting against rising tuition costs as part of the Occupy movement on the California campus. As many as 39 people were arrested in connection with the protest.

But … but … he was politically correct!:

Haverford College President Daniel H. Weiss described Birgeneau as an ardent supporter of LGBT rights, faculty diversity and affordable education for the middle class.

That wasn’t enough to save him from the protesting students and faculty members, who demanded that he sign a confession and pay tribute money before being given the opportunity to speak to their privileged selves:

For Birgeneau to be welcomed as the commencement speaker by the Haverford community, protestors had put forward nine conditions including a public apology and compensation for the victims among others. Birgeneau refused to comply with the terms in a letter.

Elite colleges are becoming deeply illiberal, intolerant places — and, therefore, stupider places. By the way, a year at Haverford will cost you $61,000. 

UPDATE: I changed the title so as not to confuse the college with the high school. And, a reader writes:

I cannot tell you how funny this is to me; truly, you can’t make this stuff up! I was a law student at Berkeley during his tenure as chancellor, including the 2011 incident. He would often send out university-wide emails containing the most predictable, doctrinaire progressive drivel. One in particular that I remember attempted to link the highly restrictive immigration laws Arizona was attempting to pass with the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords and others in Tuscon by an insane man. During the 2011 “Occupy” protests on campus, he was quite conciliatory toward the protestors, even as they were disrupting classes, although he eventually showed a small amount of backbone and had police remove them.

If his actions as chancellor disqualify him from membership in good standing in the progressive club, they have gone to crazy town and are devouring their own. I suppose it is right and proper.

It’s like the Tea Party turning on Eric Cantor in Virginia. The Error Has No Rights brigades on both sides do devour their own. Sam M points us to the relevant section of the Haverford College Honor Code:

As Haverford students, we seek an environment in which members of a diverse community can live together, interact, and learn from one another in ways that protect both personal freedom and community standards. For our diverse community to prosper, we must embrace our differences and be mindful of our varied perspectives and backgrounds; this goal is only possible if students seek mutual understanding by means of respectful communication. The Honor Code holds us accountable for our words and actions, and guides us in resolving conflicts by engaging each other in dialogue.

Oh, this is rich. So rich.

UPDATE.2: A professor at Haverford writes:

It’s been a very long time since I commented on anything on this blog, Rod, but I thought you might like to hear from someone on the inside (I’m a professor at Haverford). Your characterization of this incident (“crybabies cannot bear to lay eyes on someone whose presence they find intolerable”) strikes me as profoundly inaccurate. Your insistence that it has anything to do with political correctness or elite privilege is an example of your sloppy thinking and disregard for fairness.

During the Occupy protests on 11/9/11, Birgeneau was travelling abroad, but he authorized the campus police at Berkeley to disperse the protestors by any means necessary. The police ordered protestors to clear out but they locked arms and wouldn’t budge, so the police pushed into them and started beating them with batons. Some protestors came forward in an orderly way to present themselves for arrest. One older woman (I believe she’s in the English dept) came forward to an officer like this (hands empty and open, wrists upturned and pressed together, so he could cuff her) and he pushed her to the ground and dragged her by the hair across the quad, scratching her face on the pavement. An old woman! Other folks got the same treatment or came forward and presented themselves for arrest only to be pepper sprayed in the face or beaten with batons until they were coughing up blood. The stories of broken bones, contusions, and worse abound. Most of this stuff is extremely well documented and a lot of it is on youtube. You yourself were indignant about the craziness at UC Davis (https://theamericanconservative.com/dreher/uc-davis-police-brutality/) That protest was partly in response to the police brutality at Berkeley on 11/9, and the president and cops at Davis were just following the lead of the big boys at Berkeley.

In the days after, Birgeneau had ample opportunity to take responsibility, to discipline to police who had so badly mishandled the situation, to offer help to the students and faculty who had been beaten until they had to be hospitalized, etc. But he did none of this. In fact, he dug in and declared that protestors linking arms was “not non-violent” behavior. In later statements he did sound more regretful, but he never made it clear whether the university had done anything wrong or what exactly he understood violence to be, and of course he also did not take disciplinary action or offer to cover anyone’s medical bills.

Enter Haverford. Birgeneau was slated to receive an honorary degree at this year’s commencement, so while he would have been giving a speech, this was not an invitation to dialogue or to hear his point of view about the events on 11/9/11. The point was to honor him for his lifetime achievement. When it was announced that he had been selected for this distinction, a group of students wrote an angry letter calling him to account for his role in the police brutality on that occasion, make reparations to the people who were hurt, or at least to engage in dialogue with the Haverford community to explain what had happened. He wrote back an extremely curt two line letter saying, basically, that he doesn’t negotiate with terrorists. He even referred to the students’ letter as a “violent verbal attack.”

To be sure, the letter was aggressive in tone, embarrassingly so, but it was also morally serious. It acknowledged the great things he had done in the past and asked him to help us understand his role in 11/9 in light of his larger career. I did not sign the letter myself, but several other faculty members did sign it. One must recognize that 18-22 year olds sometimes express themselves with more vehemence than caution. This can be a frustrating thing about their writing, but it is also part of what makes it a pleasure to teach them and learn from them. There were lots of ways Birgeneau could have responded to the letter, but blowing it off the way he did is simply not the way an educator handles himself. More troubling still was his reference to the letter as violence. He apparently still does not understand what that word means. Lots of people here who didn’t like the letter and were dismayed by its tone were positively appalled by Birgeneau’s response and found themselves in reluctant agreement with the sentiment that we don’t have any business honoring this man.

It’s a black eye for the college that any of this should happen, no doubt. But I am proud of Haverford for realizing the mistake of inviting Birgeneau, and I’m glad we won’t be going through with it. It’s not that our students are crybabies who can’t bear to lay eyes on someone they disagree with, Rod. Indeed we would have been delighted for him to come out here and talk with us about what happened on 11/9 (and what violence is and what legitimate protest is and so on), but he clearly wasn’t interested in doing so.

I’m sorry that you can only understand this as intolerance or blame it somehow on elitism, i.e. the high tuition at places like Haverford. Yes, there are some rich students here, but lots of my students are here on scholarship. Rich or poor or in between, most of my students work really hard at learning what I try to teach them, and I am very often moved by how spiritually generous, maturely thoughtful, and even merciful they are. They are not inhospitable and they are not tots.

Thanks for the remarks. I can easiy accept that Birgeneau behaved badly, and I can easily accept the idea that he shouldn’t have been invited to speak at Haverford. What chaps me is the idea that a small number of faculty and students told him that in order to speak on campus, he ought to write out some kind of confession, and pay “reparations” to the people injured. It’s a destructive principle, this idea that students and faculty can force a commencement speaker to withdraw because they don’t like the way he or she has behaved. Where does it stop? True — and importantly — Haverford institutionally didn’t withdraw the invitation itself. But it’s a bad sign when a student-faculty protest, especially one as small as this, has the effect of forcing a speaker to cancel his plans to speak. Birgeneau is hard to sympathize with, but what if the speaker were, say, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, and a group of LGBT and feminists wrote to issue him a set of demands that he must fulfill before coming to campus, or there will be trouble? The withdrawal of Birgeneau — and Christine Lagarde, and Condi Rice — seems to me to be granting a heckler’s veto to speakers who might be controversial. What if Birgeneau had distinguished himself intellectually, however poorly he handled himself as an administrator? Is there anybody available to be a commencement speaker who hasn’t offended anybody? Besides Oprah, I mean?

Anyway, yes, college students do express themselves with more vehemence than caution at times, but it seems to me to be a disturbing trend at the colleges that turn out this country’s elites — I’m thinking of Stanford with Ryan T. Anderson, as well as the other recent cases — the vehement are given more sway over the campus atmosphere than is healthy for the sake of intellectual inquiry and diversity. If I’m going to pay that kind of money for my kid to get a top-flight education, I don’t want the mob, however large or however small, to have the power to drive speakers it doesn’t like off of campus.