Bill Clinton presented his vision of the future at his talk at N.C. State University on Monday, as part of the Millennium Seminar series. As expected, his vision resembles various planks on the Democratic Party platform.
Sadly, the entire Millennium series is starting to look like the Democratic Party platform. The series is N.C. State’s premier vehicle for bringing in outside speakers to its Raleigh campus, and it has received a great deal of publicity. The university system is not supposed to show favoritism for one political party and its beliefs in such endeavors. But then, the wife of Democratic ex-Governor Mike Easley invites the speakers.
Many ethical questions were raised about the hiring and promotion of Mary Easley at N.C. State in the summer of 2008. This was largely due to her whopping 88 percent pay raise in July, from $90,300 to $170,000. The furor over her university job came on the heels of allegations about the Easleys’ apparent disregard for taxpayers’ money when it came to the couple’s personal expenses, including state-funded trips to Europe.
Easley’s pay raise was defended by the school partially on the grounds that somebody of her stature needs to be in charge of the series in order to attract high-profile speakers. Maybe it’s time to also look at the ideological bias she is bringing onto State’s campus.
In its first three years, the series has scheduled thirteen speakers. Six have been non-political, either businessmen or scientists (and NCAA president Miles Brand). Of the remaining seven, four have been high-ranking members of the national Democratic Party establishment, including Clinton, two former members of his cabinet, education secretary Donna Shalala and labor secretary Robert Reich, and former Senator Bill Bradley. A fifth ardent liberal who spoke was PBS talk show host Charlie Rose.
Supporters of Easley might say that the series is politically balanced because of the two other speakers, former Reagan advisor David Gergen and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. To suggest that these two represent conservative or “free market” thinking is an insult to conservatives, for they are held in contempt by the Republican Party’s conservative wing. Gergen may have worked for Republican presidents, but he was also a close advisor to Clinton, and his recent work as a political analyst on CNN shows a man of no strong political convictions. With the wind now blowing to the left, so does he.
Graham is reviled by much of the political right. Time and again he has served as a foil to conservative causes. The American Spectator, a leading conservative publication, entitled a May 15, 2008 article about him “The Worst Republican Senator,” then chronicled the many times he undercut President Bush and his fellow congressional Republicans.
To provide balance to dyed-in-the-wool liberals like Bradley and Clinton, it would be necessary to bring in conservative stalwarts like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum or former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. It almost appears as if the invitations to Gergen and Graham were premeditated to deflect accusations of bias without actually bringing a true free-market political voice onto campus.
While Clinton is often is described as a “centrist” in the media, he was openly tilting to the left at N.C. State. Among the ideas strongly identified with liberals he presented were the need for policies to counteract climate change and the need for a universal national health care system.
Clinton’s vision of the world and the country is a liberal Democrat’s view—he took a slap at President Bush by suggesting that the rest of the world respects the United States again with the transition of power to President Obama. He also expressed a belief that the U.S. should no longer act “unilaterally” in its own interests, but should act for the good of an “interdependent” world—this suggests a willing submission to international organizations like the United Nations or World Court only favored in this country by those on the left.
Bill Clinton is an entertaining and persuasive speaker—he possesses the ability to influence people who are uncertain. Young people sitting in the audience might find no reason to question anything he said—unless they are already aware of the arguments countering Clinton’s claims. For example, a great many countries with the sort of national health care system he favors deliver inferior medical services to their citizens compared with the care provided by the more decentralized system in the United States. And the claim that mankind is causing the Earth’s temperature to rise is becoming more suspect daily: some recent evidence reveals a possible cooling trend, and many scientists reject the idea that humanity’s impact on the climate matters much in the face of powerful natural forces present in the universe.
This is not to suggest that Bill Clinton should not speak at N.C. State—he is the former president, and by all means we should hear his vision of the future. However, we should hear the other side as well, for the sake of fairness, for balance, and for intellectual discourse.
Many in the academic establishment deny that any ideological bias exists on the American campus, but the numbers tell a story of deliberate imbalance. There have been five speakers strongly identified with the Democratic Party or liberal opinions, all appearing since October of 2007, and only two relatively liberal Republican speakers (both appearing early in the fall semester of 2006).
It is hard not to raise the question whether, in this case, the state’s currently dominant political party is using its advantage to essentially silence the opposition on this state-supported campus by simply not offering them a voice. Without a more balanced slate of speakers, students are being cheated out of exposure to the full range of opinions and the chance to make up their own minds.
Instead of such a one-sided argument, let the campus feature open debate and a clash of ideas, and let the best ideas win—that is how a democracy is supposed to function. So far, Mary Easley’s Millennium Seminar Series has been an affront to that sentiment.