Misnomer Alert:
Colleges Celebrate Diversity with Separate Commencements
No, it is not diversity when different ethnic groups peel off and hold their separate commencement ceremonies. It is the opposite of diversity. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs a dictionary.
But here is the story from the New York Times:
Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”
Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.
“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech.
From events once cobbled together on shoestring budgets and hidden in back rooms, alternative commencements like the one held at Harvard have become more mainstream, more openly embraced by universities and more common than ever before.
I don't know which is worse: Zuckerberg's inanities, or the isolation of black students, recipients of a Harvard degree, to tell them what terrible discrimination they have suffered.
Maybe this is the worst: Somebody who has made it to the nation's most famous newspaper but has such a limited command of a vocabulary.