FIVE YEARS FROM TIBET: Today marks the five-year anniversary of the historic visit of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama to my alma mater, Brandeis University. Now it's quite hard to describe what an extraordinary event this was: 1998 was also the 50th anniversary of both the State of Israel and Brandeis itself, but both of those commemorations took a back seat to preparations for His Holiness' visit.
Despite a full-court press of events and programming leading up to the visit, and the stirring speech delivered by His Holiness that day, the behavior of Brandeis' student body in reaction to the visit was nothing short of embarrassing. When the Dalai Lama emerged from his motorcade and memorably exchanged hugs with then-Hillel director Rabbi Albert Axelrad, the moment was nearly ruined when students began yelling, "aw, he's so cute!" Another student rubbed his head, quite a no-no in Buddhism I'm told. And even worse, most discussion I heard on campus the day of the speech had nothing to do with anything His Holiness had said or done, but rather centered on what other celebrities were rumored to be on campus that day. Richard Gere! The Beastie Boys! That made clear that even after months of special programming and teach-ins, the average Brandeis student didn't have a clue who the Dalai Lama was or what he stood for- to them he was just another celebrity. And one not as interesting to them, I may add, as Richard Gere.
This theory of mine was bolstered when Students for a Free Tibet, which at the time of the visit was one of the campus' largest student organizations, was de-chartered less than a year later, more for lack of interest than anything else. And have you noticed how Tibet's really started to fall down the list of trendy activist causes? I mean, the Beastie Boys aren't even talking about it anymore.
COMMENCEMENT BLUES: The graduation of the class of 2003, the final students that I ever attended Brandeis with, will take place on May 18. This year's honorary degree recipients include former Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke, "John Adams" author David MacCullough, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (?), and the commencement speaker, Israeli supreme court President Aharon Barak.
I've heard no big complaints yet about Barak, but I can say that with the exception of my year's speaker, Desmond Tutu, there was a lot of controversy over who the speaker was every year I was there, mostly driven by hypersensitive fools with easy access to the Justice letters page. In '97 it was then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who drew protest because some students found it "unseemly" for the leader of Germany to address a university of Jewish students, many of whom were descendents of Holocaust survivors. Yes, Brandeis actually came under fire for failing to pander to the irrational prejudices of peoples' grandparents. In '98 the honor went to Shimon Peres, who faced small but vocal opposition from the hawkish among the Brandeis community. And in 1999 a freshly back-from-space John Glenn was met with resistance from campus feminists, who were upset that both the former astronaut and the student commencement speaker that year were "white males named John." (Glenn didn't help himself, delivering a rambling speech in which he confused "Star Wars" with "Star Trek." No, the first human to orbit the Earth is not a sci-fi geek).
But these skirmishes were a mere warmup for 2001, when the honor went to Fidelity honcho Peter Lynch. Now setting aside that Lynch has raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars for charity, his selection left two different sets of pissed-off graduates- 1) activist/Marxist types who were angry that the home of "social justice" was awarding a degree to such a leading capitalist, and 2) those who had never actually heard of Peter Lynch, and were upset because they felt they were entitled to a more famous speaker. I told this story a while later to a friend and fellow 'deis alum (no, not him), who had the reaction that Brandeis wasn't worthy of Peter Lynch's presence.
Last year's speaker was Ted Koppel. No complaints from anyone that I can remember, though I would've liked to see someone start a movement to get Koppel bumped as speaker in favor of David Letterman, as ABC was considering at the time.
These stories should prove the existence of a pattern: Students at Brandeis like to complain. Right up 'til the end.