On the Right - Hillary at Yale?(protests over Hillary Clinton as commencement speaker)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, MARCH 30

A protest movement is fomenting at Yale University, protesting the selection of Sen. Hillary Clinton as commencement speaker. The idea of the band of conservative students is not to disrupt the commencement proceedings, but to boycott at least that part of it in which she will figure.

I am not privy to proposed arrangements. Presumably the conservative protesters could linger at the gates of the old campus until Sen. Clinton was through speaking. Or, much more disruptively, they could walk away from their seats on the campus when she was introduced, and return after she was done speaking. More destructively still, they could do what the students at Brown did when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the speaker, rising from their seats and turning their backs on him until he was done.

Protests, in the Vietnam years, achieved a pretty high din. At Yale in 1970 the entire commencement proceeding was canceled. That decision, made by President Kingman Brewster, sometime law professor, reacted to what I have called the skyjacker's leverage. The person who wishes to take control of an airplane with 400 people in it finds it relatively easy to do, since flying 500 miles per hour 35,000 feet above the ground puts the odds for successful disruption in a single pair of hands. On a college campus a half-dozen students, if that is their design, can disrupt proceedings.

I am a longtime beneficiary of good manners and indulgence by student bodies, having delivered over 30 commencement addresses. At almost all, the students were good-natured about having to listen to a conservative, as their terminal academic ordeal. The one exception was, to say the least, colorful. At the University of California at Riverside, seated on the dais before speaking, I looked down on a cardboard box brought up and dropped on my lap by a dissenting student. The wiggling betrayed a live presence; from the box, offloaded from my lap, a small pig emerged and scampered over to the university president, who was engaged in reading a Rhodes Scholarship award to a proud young graduate, who ...