Video Selection of the Week (May 28)

Commencement and Honorary Degree Season
	Sorry to have been away from CPAL selections for some time. This is a busy time of year for me and it's not like anyone has been particularly upset that the selections slowed to a trickle and then pretty much dried up. I have been testing a few alternative methods of making this kind of material available. Following Paul's suggestion, I spent a bit of time with Facebook. And I've put some time into Joe Briggs Place. Nothing is quite ready for prime time yet. It all takes longer than it should and everything has drawbacks.
Cyberpal Selection: Anyway at this time of year there has usually been a commencement address selected as a CPAL selection. Tom Engelhardt's "Close Your Eyes: The Graduation Speech I'll Never Give," is not a bad choice for these scoundrel times. Most people could find it themselves if they really wanted to. However, when I saw the YouTube video of Andrew Card's reception at the U Mass Amherst Graduate Commencement, it did seem to me it was worth putting the two together. It's worth watching the whole four minutes of the video to see what a madhouse the auditorium was. After all, this was a graduation for policy wonks, the kind of people who usually know how to keep their their innermost thoughts and feelings firmly under control when there are job searches under way. Interesting. The CPAL selections around commencement addresses started four years ago in the spring of Mission Accomplished. That year Chris Hedges attempted to deliver an address at Rockford College in on May 21st, 2003  You can hear most of the address here. What a difference four years makes! A previous CPAL address giver, Mark Danner gave the commencement address at Berkeley's Department of Rhetoric this year. It's worth looking at. As well, I thought that Bill Moyers made an interesting speech at SMU's graduation in the wake of Virginia Tech. You can see the video of the address here. As the season winds down to the end, some might find it interesting to watch the President of De Paul University being refused handshakes by some of his grads here after personally intervening in a tenure matter to make his campus safe for Alan Dershowitz.