It was unfortunate that the Herald chose to run yet another snide and stupid editorial from its snide and stupid campaign to bring "big names" to UW commencements.
This is the second time in as many weeks that the Herald has advocated raising student segregated fees by $1 or $2 so that UW can pay a speaker like Bill Clinton, John McCain, John Mellencamp or Dan Rather to come to campus and give a generic speech to an audience to whom he/she has no connection. On most days I would think the Mellencamp reference was a joke, but he was cited in the middle of a long list of characters, instead of at the end in typical punch-line form.
The Herald's lust for people of power would not be so bad if it didn't also take the time to mock speakers who don't ruthlessly gouge public university coffers.
[W]e think it'd be even more disheartening to tell our proud grandparents that the speaker at our graduation will be a guy who founded a nonprofit that gives underprivileged children the chance to have a portrait of them painted by a professional artists. Yeah, that was a speaker.
Today they made fun of those who help the poor again:
How do these students, whose only crime was to graduate from one of the bigger colleges, get to end their college careers? By listening to a guy named James Kass, a 1991 alumnus of UW who founded a San Francisco-based nonprofit called Youth Speaks, which aims to improve literacy rates among children.
It's ironic that the Herald, in discussing what speaker should come and deliver a message that will almost definitely be about "service" and principle, is so cynical as to evaluate speakers solely only on their name recognition and power.
