BU commencement speaker

***Jess, I recognize that this letter may no longer be timely, but I have sent it twice in the last 2 weeks and it has been bounced back to me both times because of problems with your email/internet server. Anyway, it’s in response to a column that Denise wrote a couple weeks back. Thanks for your consideration.

Hope things are going well with you.

–Luke****

By, Luke Hartig, CAS ’02, former DFP Photo Editor and Back Bay Publishing Co. Trustee

Ah, soon you BU seniors will blink and you’ll be sitting at the Senior Brunch, enjoying paltry portions of breakfast sausage from BU catering and finding out who your commencement speaker will be. And as Denise Spellman points out so eloquently in her recent column, you are probably going to get shafted. But expect BU to be surprisingly gentle, and don’t think that you’ll have a chance to protest. Just take refuge in knowing that this is the last time you’ll ever hear BU say, “this is not a democracy, and we don’t really care what you students think.”

As commencement approached last year, the rumors started going round that Chancellor John Silber was going to be our commencement speaker. Like most seniors, I was upset, so my friends and I planned to walk out of the Senior Brunch in protest if Silber was announced as the speaker. Previous BU seniors had seen amazing personalities speak. Why should we be stuck listening to the most hated man on campus sending us forth in to a world deluded by homophobes and control freaks such as himself?

When then President Westling gave his address at the brunch, we knew the moment of truth was drawing near. But first he had some other unfinished business to tend to. Former Student Union President Zachary Coseglia had recently submitted the Union’s proposal to change the guest policy-a masterful work packed with hard research statistics, strong reason, and a viable policy solution. BU addressed the issue with mockery. We were shown a video parody of “The Osbournes” in which that loveable Terrier Rhett overstays his welcome because of an open guest policy. Amid laughter and guffaws, Westling succeeded in pulling the students’ attention off of the pressing matter and sidestepped giving any official response, completely disrespecting the Union’s work in the process. How could we be mad at BU while watching the semi-retarded muttering of Ozzy Osbourne? After a summer and part of a semester had passed and the angst had fizzled a bit, BU finally gave you a ridiculously small alteration that appeased most of you but didn’t really change much. When I read about the guest policy “change,” I was upset that BU had given so little and enraged that the apathetic student body had accepted it without major protest. But did I really have any reason to expect anything more?

Then it was finally time for the pressing issue, that of the speaker. President Westling started with stirring remarks on 9/11 and what we had endured in our final year of college. He reminded us that we would never recall that last year of idealism without remembering the sight of the World Trade Center tumbling to the ground. As many students hung their heads in sadness during what was supposed to be a morning of celebration, Westling announced that the commencement exercises would be a tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks and that he would give the address, with the assistance of the surviving families of BU alumni who died in the attacks. Any of us who planned to walk out in protest were stopped in our tracks. By tying his disappointing announcement to 9/11, none of us could have protested without being seen as insensitive, rude, and dare I say, unpatriotic. BU had succeeded in using the nation’s most horrific tragedy to quell protest over its decision.

In 1991, President George Bush and French President Francois Mitterand offered their encouragement to BU grads at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of new lives. We were not so blessed. I left the brunch wishing that we did have Silber as our speaker, because at least he would say something controversial and get us a little charged up. Westling’s too nice of a guy to piss off anybody, except for the BU Board of Trustees. And I remember the sense of betrayal I felt when Westling was asked to step down, and my commencement speaker was now nothing more than an unemployed college president who probably wouldn’t get hired anywhere else because he doesn’t even have a Ph.D. They used you Mr. Westling, time and again, and the final straw was the 2002 Commencement.

My huge contingent of West Coast family came out for graduation, and it was a great weekend, of course. During the commencement exercises, my dad recalled the glory days of honorary degree recipient Bill Russell and my brothers and grandpa ogled over Marisa Tomei (a BU dropout but still deserving of an Honorary Doctorate). But they all wondered who the hell John Westling was. And they were all disappointed by the solemnity and inappropriateness of such a somber ceremony of remembrance on a day of great celebration. I thought it was a fitting testimony for an institution that cares very little about what its students think and then wonders why alumni never donate.