University commencements are broken. Here’s how to fix them.
Take a page out of Vanderbilt and Dartmouth’s book: Choose honored guests impartially.
Something unusual is afoot on two campuses. Vanderbilt University last week had as its commencement speaker former American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks, a political conservative. Soon, Dartmouth College will confer an honorary doctorate on Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an outspoken and ideologically impartial defender of free speech and academic freedom. As the recipient of one such award at my employer, Princeton, might note: The times they are a-changin’.
In 2022, Hope Leman and I surveyed the speakers that spring at the nation’s top 25 research universities and top 25 liberal arts colleges. Our finding: There was not a single conservative among a sea of liberal and progressive speakers. A harmless coincidence? No. It was a scandal.
There are various ways colleges and universities signal to their principal constituencies — current and prospective students, alumni, faculty, staff, parents, financial supporters — what they understand the mission of their institutions to be and therefore what they hold to be valuable and exemplary. An important way they do so is by honoring certain people by inviting them to speak at major university events and granting them awards. When year in and year out, virtually no one with a conservative political profile is among those honored, it sends an unmistakable message: The institution is partisan, and the achievements it wants its students to regard as worth striving for are those that advance left-wing causes.
Take politicians. It’s fine for a university to have as its commencement speaker, say, Hillary Clinton or Jamie Raskin. Both have served the nation in high political office and are deeply admired by many. What’s not fine is for institutions that purport to be nonpartisan and nonideological to treat only liberals and Democrats like Clinton and Raskin as eligible for such honors.
If the purpose of a university is, as it should be, the pursuit of truth and the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, then a lack of viewpoint diversity is just as scandalous in commencement speakers and honorary degree recipients as it is in faculty hiring and student admissions. The scandal is not merely one of unfairness to conservatives who are excluded from university recognitions. Nor, strictly speaking, is it the hypocrisy of institutions that market themselves as nonideological while conducting their affairs in highly ideological ways. The problem is the damage that political and ideological partisanship inflicts on the university’s mission.
That prejudice isn’t necessarily surprising. People are naturally biased toward those who think the way they do. That’s the human condition. Often, bias is unconscious, making it hard to dislodge. Surely some of the commencement conformity flows from inattentiveness or a lack of careful thinking on the part of administrators. When Leman and I published our 2022 review, even some of the people involved in selecting honorees said they were surprised by what we discovered.
Yet part of the problem is also that those responsible for choosing a ceremony’s guests are intimidated by fear of protest and disruption. They have capitulated to a form of the heckler’s veto. If Columbia or Swarthmore has Michelle Obama as its commencement speaker or confers an honorary doctorate on Robert Reich, there is no fear the day will be ruined for graduates and their families by ugly acts of protest. The same wouldn’t be true if such institutions were to honor, say, Tim Scott or Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
It’s understandable that administrators and trustees want to avoid drama. If, however, the net result is maintaining a partisan litmus test, thus compromising an institution’s integrity and undermining its mission, the price of avoiding the risk of disruption is simply too steep. University presidents, provosts and trustees — the people who decide on speakers and honorary degree recipients — need to acknowledge the problem and do something about it.
Thankfully there’s good news. In recent months some of our nation’s most important and influential institutions of higher learning have begun to acknowledge the damage their ideological bubbles have done. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, has publicly vowed to do something about it, noting that “truth is rarely found in echo chambers.” The Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, commissioned by the university’s president, Maurie McInnis, is more evidence that higher-education leaders are facing up to the problem of groupthink on campuses.
Now we need the follow-through. That doesn’t mean seeking to implement affirmative action for graduation day. The trustees and administrators thinking about honorees for next year don’t need to seek equal or proportional representation for conservatives. They ought, however, in fidelity to their mission, to select impartially. Doing so would signal that their institutions honor achievement no matter the political leanings of the achievers.
Princeton set an example two years ago, when it conferred an honorary degree on Lamar Alexander, the former Republican senator from Tennessee. Vanderbilt and Dartmouth are showing the way forward today. Their example is worth following.
Originally published at The Washington Post on May 11, 2026
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