Anti-Israel Students Protest Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech

In a continuation of the campus anti-Israel histrionics observed across the country during the past month, some Duke University students decided to walk out of their graduation ceremony when Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld was introduced to give the commencement speech. They earned each and every boo directed at them (boos that NBC News incorrectly reports were aimed at Seinfeld rather than the attention-seeking keffiyeh kids).

Graduations have always been performances (pomp, meet circumstance), and they offer opportunities for schools to tout their value and prestige while top-performing students address their peers. In the past, valedictorians have used their few minutes to inflate themselves and flatter their egos. Now, the limelight capture has become a collective effort for those who wish to do nothing of substance to aid Gazans while making sure their insubstantial digital friends can exalt their “bravery” from afar. What rubbish.

Credit to those in the audience who booed the malcontents. Graduations are not about any one student, especially the type of student who has the time to develop an underdeveloped opinion about a conflict thousands of miles away. I’m of the opinion that any department overrepresented with graduating walkouts should be investigated for academic malpractice by the school administration to answer the question, “How did they manage to pass so many idle idiots?” Graduates from any “studies” discipline should be granted nothing beyond a golf clap — save that metacarpular energy for the STEM graduates who’ll materially improve the world.

And really, the disrespect of disrupting an emotional event like a graduation, one wherein many have sacrificed much to walk across the stage, should come with a loss of diploma. I have a lot of patience for collegiate folly — incrementally shedding the skin of stupidity is the purpose of school, really — but all that stops at graduation. If one is so monumentally selfish that one cannot sit through Jerry Seinfeld’s self-satisfied monologuing for 15 minutes, the graduate does not deserve a diploma. You lose. Try again next year at another school — you obviously don’t value a Duke diploma enough to shut your mouth and applaud those who worked harder than you.

The same goes for disruptful graduating anti-Israel ingrates at UC Berkeley and those who walked out of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s commencement speech at VCU. And before the “Groypers” get to griping about the so-called special treatment of Israel, this is not a speech issue; it’s a decency one. Graduates could shout about the merits of Luther’s small catechism, and I’d say the same: There are times and places to be quiet and be part of something beyond yourself and your opinions. (Semiseriously, I really do worry that the disappearance of a mother’s almighty backhand to the pie hole, combined with inexperience in hallowed and elevated settings like church and others, has resulted in a large swath of the population not knowing when and how to shut up.)

Put simply: “Manners maketh Man,” to quote the good bishop of Winchester.