President to Speak at Graduation Ceremony

[KRAM1]

President Obama is set to be the graduation Commencement speaker on May 8th at Soth Dakota's Lake Area Technical Institute (a local community college).

Will the students there have a tad more class than to start a lazy man's on-line petition in protest? Will students contend they will "walk out" on the President? Or, might they set up an alternative commencement address by someone who believes in "conversion theory"?

Time will tell...time will tell.

[SCREAMING EAGLE-66]

.

This whole situation is ridiculous ..... As long as the speaker isn't there to push some extreme agenda ... leave him alone and shut up...... and listen. Gorbachev came to Midland College and I went .. it doesn't mean I agree with everything he said ...... plus I have gone to see Ben Stine and others at MC.... . didn't agree with everything he said either. .. . Don't be so narrow minded.... I remember some on a right wing radio protesting that "Commie" being in town.. Crazy... I am sure that in the past some would have protested Sandra Day O'Conner speaking because she was a woman on the Supreme Court and "women have no right to be there"... Grow up. ... heard her at MC too ..... She was first in law class and no law firm would hire her when she graduated .... wrong gender .. things change.

This week Jay Leno is here at MC. .... so if I watch Letterman instead ... I should protest..?? I have tickets and will go.

[GreenMachine]

http://ntdaily.com/administrators-chose-abbott-not-students/

This sums up the valid discontent on campus, despite what people want you to believe.

Also, I would hope you know the "alternative commencement" was set up way before Abbott's announcement as someone so heavily involved in the university. Not a slam, at all, just wanted to clarify that. They are using the discontent to promote their graduation more, but it was already set.

"What is most important is to rank UNT’s image behind the hard work and achievement of the graduates. The event is about the graduates. Administrators have to plan for the future, and prestigious speakers sometimes help recruitment, but a graduation ceremony is time to reward the graduates.

Never, on this campus, nor at any university across the globe, should the views of students be secondary to the business sense of university administrators. Students didn’t nominate Abbott, UNT administrators did."

The discontent from the students is from a very very small %. If only 2200 people (not necessarly students) signed an on-line petition, that tells you how few people are really upset about it. Are these same people going to get bent out of shape when the CEO of the company they work for has a different opinion than them? Are they going to cry when there boss says something they don't like? The real world is NOT going to bend over and cater to these people, I totally don't understand why they think a university will.

[KRAM1]

The students at the South Dakota Community College did not nominate Obama to speak either. What does that have to do with anything?

[ColoradoEagle]

So about all those posts proclaiming how Republicans respect the office and the same thing would never happen if the tables were turned...

https://www.facebook.com/keloland/posts/10152383378828078

Edited April 15, 2015 by ColoradoEagle

[GreenMachine]

So about all those posts proclaiming how Republicans respect the office and the same thing would never happen if the tables were turned...

https://www.facebook.com/keloland/posts/10152383378828078

wow, a few ass clowns made negative comments, you have dipshits on both sides and always will. Didn't see anything about planning a kiss in, walking out during his speech or planning an alternative ceremony. Other than that, yeah, the same situation. Edited April 15, 2015 by GreenMachine

[Ryan Munthe]

So, what I'm gathering is that nobody read the article.

[UNT90]

So about all those posts proclaiming how Republicans respect the office and the same thing would never happen if the tables were turned...

https://www.facebook.com/keloland/posts/10152383378828078

Wait.

So you now equate dumbass Facebook posts to an active petition by students to stop the governor from speaking?

Not surprised to see this from you at this point.

[UNTcrazy727]

So, what I'm gathering is that nobody read the article.

Does it seem a little shady on the surface that the administrators switched speakers? Sure, but if you asked the average student they wouldn't care. The vast majority of people attending the ceremony could care less who the speaker will be. There is no mass discontent on campus like you or the NT Daily want us to believe. This is such a small issue that a select few are blowing up and putting UNT in a negative light.

[UNTLifer]

Yep, the vocal minority strikes again.

[Coffee and TV]

Damn minorities always protesting and speaking their mind.

[FirefightnRick]

"How our colleges are failing liberal students"

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/how-our-colleges-are-failing-liberal-students/article/2562850

Too often, American college students face a one-question test, based not on facts, but on ideology. The test: "Are you a liberal, or conservative?"

The correct answer is, "I'm a liberal, and proud of it."

That concerns me, but I'm not worried much about the students who get it wrong. I'm worried about those who get it right.

The young people that our educational system is failing are the students on the Left. We promise to educate them, but they aren't being challenged, and don't learn to think.

I was Chair of Political Science at Duke for ten years. At a meeting of department heads, we heard from the chair of one our Departments of Indignation Studies. "I find that I don't really need to spend much time with the liberal students," he said, "because they already have it right. I spend most of my time arguing with the conservative students. That's how I spend my time in class."

This woman was teaching conservative students how to think about arguments and evidence; how to make your arguments in a persuasive way. She was educating them. Her liberal students? They were given that one-question test, and practically no further instruction after that.

It may have come as a shock to the parents of these liberal students that they had learned everything they needed to know in high school. Having memorized a kind of secular leftist catechism, they were merely paying tuition so they could wander around the quads of Duke and enjoy themselves.

John Stuart Mill once argued that we should regard our overall approach to education as collision with error. He wrote: "[The] peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

The absence of dissenting voices in many departments is harmful, not so much to those who would agree with the dissenting voice, but those who are thus denied the chance to collide with error.

It's as if we asked students to play chess, but only taught them one-move openings. They think that pawn to king four is a better move than pawn to king's rook four, but that's simply a matter of faith.

Conservative students, by contrast, must learn to play chess as they encounter pervasive campus liberalism. They must study the whole game, not just the first move. They learn countermoves, they consider the advantages of different approaches. They have to defend their ideas by searching out empirical arguments, by reading articles and white papers.

"He who knows only his own side of the case," Mill wrote, "knows little of that.if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."

Students who pass the one-question test find themselves in this position, and no one loves them enough to tell them. They respond to others' ideas and arguments with anti-intellectual, argument-stopping cliches such as "micro-aggression" and "check your privilege." They impugn the motives of their interlocutors ("you must be funded by the Koch brothers") or even impugn entire disciplines ("economists don't understand the real world"). This is turning academia into a toxic retention pond with a dangerous concentration of ignorance and ideological bigotry. And it is now gradually bleeding its way into mainstream culture....."

Rick

Edited April 15, 2015 by FirefightnRick

[ColoradoEagle]

Not surprised to see this from you at this point.

Between the posts on there and the main website, there were several mentions of people protesting, walking out, one even so far as having the sheriff arrest the President once he was within county lines. The point is people are people, and they're going to react the same way when they feel strongly about something. Some are definitely dumber than others.

[Coffee and TV]

wow, a few ass clowns made negative comments, you have dipshits on both sides and always will. Didn't see anything about planning a kiss in, walking out during his speech or planning an alternative ceremony. Other than that, yeah, the same situation.

Nah, they just turn over the tombstone's of their political opposition's parents.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clinton-father-tombstone-toppled-116993.html

Come on. Stop acting like conservatives hold some sort of higher ground when it comes to shit like this. You could have just kept it to "dispshits on either side" and left it at that.

[UNT90]

Between the posts on there and the main website, there were several mentions of people protesting, walking out, one even so far as having the sheriff arrest the President once he was within county lines. The point is people are people, and they're going to react the same way when they feel strongly about something. Some are definitely dumber than others.

Here is done breaking news for you; people say stupid crap on Facebook. A lot.

Has there been multiple news stories done by the local media on these post, embarrassing the school and it's thinking alumni? No. Is there any organized movement you can point to anywhere to stop Pres. Obama from making this address? No.

You are simply trying to justify an unjustifiable agenda.

And make no mistake, the agenda is to silence any opinion that you personally don't share.

[MeanGreenTexan]

I kinda feel like these threads about the Governor speaking at UNT's commencement and Pres. Obama talking at some random school in the Dakotas is kinda like the wrestler climbing out of the ring to grab a chair. He's still wrestling though... Get back in the Cage folks.

[ColoradoEagle]

Here is done breaking news for you; people say stupid crap on Facebook. A lot.

Has there been multiple news stories done by the local media on these post, embarrassing the school and it's thinking alumni? No. Is there any organized movement you can point to anywhere to stop Pres. Obama from making this address? No.

You are simply trying to justify an unjustifiable agenda.

And make no mistake, the agenda is to silence any opinion that you personally don't share.

It's a school that's 1/17th the size of UNT, and a community college, not a university. Anyone not deluding themselves can see it as the same reaction from the other side.

[Ryan Munthe]

I kinda feel like these threads about the Governor speaking at UNT's commencement and Pres. Obama talking at some random school in the Dakotas is kinda like the wrestler climbing out of the ring to grab a chair. He's still wrestling though... Get back in the Cage folks.

Why is that GIF so mesmerizing? I can't stop watching it.

[UNT90]

It's a school that's 1/17th the size of UNT, and a community college, not a university. Anyone not deluding themselves can see it as the same reaction from the other side.

Delusion.

A good word for comparing mindless chatter on Facebook to an organized petition and multiple news stories about said petition, all which reinforce a certain stereotype about UNT.

Politics over university, eh?