Down with celebrity graduation speakers: Stop spending fortunes for irrelevant commencement addesses
http://www.salon.com/2016/05/20/down_with_celebrity_graduation_speakers_stop_spending_fortunes_for_irrelevant_commencement_addesses/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
Down with celebrity graduation speakers: Stop spending fortunes for irrelevant commencement addesses
If you’re one of the thousands of people about to graduate college over the next few weeks – or one of the thousands heading to a campus to watch the procession — you probably want a lively, intelligent, even inspiring commencement speech. Everybody wins if this is fun, if new graduates head into the world with a sense of purpose, with a jolt of energy, with good memories about an important day.
But lately, the costs of commencement speakers have started to ramp up. The Associated Press had made a series of record requests and reports them today.
As many colleges struggle with tight budgets, some have drawn sharp criticism for paying hefty speaking fees. The University of Houston, which increased tuition this year, paid $166,000 to bring Matthew McConaughey to speak last spring, including $9,500 for his airfare. The University of Oklahoma paid $110,000 to book journalist Katie Couric in 2006. Both speakers donated their fees to charity, but their costs sparked a debate about whether colleges pay too much for pageantry.
These are the most extreme cases, but there are others: $35,000 for astronaut Scott Kelly at the University of Houston, Kean University paying $40,000 each for astronaut Mark Kelly (and Scott Kelly’s twin) and Humans of New York founder Brandon Stanton. (What is it about astronauts? Oh, the places you’ll go.) The University of Georgia paying $22,000 for a chartered flight for Amy Robach, ABC News Anchor.
Now, I’d like to see a lot of these people speak. And what’s the harm in it? Well, all of these schools are public universities, meaning that most of these fees come from the public. But you don’t have to be an anti-tax zealot to get frustrated by this.
The point of universities, especially public universities, is to educate a wide range of students. And while some of them do a great job, many of them have been jacking their fees up, making their education increasingly inaccessible. And nearly all of them have been paying the people who do a lot of the teaching – adjunct faculty members — very little. As The Atlantic reports :
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I wonder how relevant many of these celebrity commencement speeches are?
If they paid that much for Spike Lee they were robbed. He had to have given one of the worst commencement speeches ever! There was zero inspirational about it. He did nothing but quote other people's quotes. He got political, which was totally inappropriate. He literally spoke the entire Prince song "Baltimore" with no context and no substance to follow. Then he left the stage, which is considered rude, since he was just given an honorary degree.
I have heard amazing commencement speeches, but this was not even on a 5th grade level. Johns Hopkins was robbed. I actually videoed it, but I don't want to post it, since it was that embarrassing, and I don't people on youtube to think I actually liked it.
Yes, but how do you really feel about it?
Seriously, it sounds very disappointing for the graduates and their families.
I watched this video and Perrie is right.
I am not really a Spike Lee fan although a couple of his movies have been masterpieces, imo. This speech at the Hopkins graduation though, is tiresome, unenergetic, sloppily delivered, and mainly not appropriate for a happy occasion like a college graduation.
He talks almost entirely about social injustice and Obama and Trump, topics which I talk about myself but don't think are that fitting for a commencement address. Colleges might want to rethink this stuff.