Pulitzer Prize-winner Heckled During His Commencement Address

May 21, 2003

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, was the commencement speaker at Rockford College's graduation ceremony on May 17.

Hedges, the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," which was a a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, dispensed with the usual pap on pomp day and got right down to serious business.

"I want to talk to you today about war and empire," he began. "Killing, or at least the worst of it, is over in Iraq. Although blood will continue to spill--theirs and ours--be prepared for this. For we are embarking on an occupation that, if history is any guide, will be as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige, power, and security."

That's about all it took to get the boos and heckling starting.

"Not long after I began speaking, a significant segment of the crowd began to shout me down," Hedges tells The Progressive. "They were yelling, 'God bless America,' 'Send him to France,' 'Get him out of here,' stuff like that."

Twice during Hedges's eighteen-minute speech, his microphone was unplugged.

"Should I keep going?" he asked the college president, Paul Pribbenow, at one point.

And when Hedges did resume, he was met with a cacophony of catcalls.

Some people even charged the speaker's stand. "People were climbing on the platform," Hedges says. "It was threatening, and a little bit disturbing."

As the harassment continued, "the president thought we should perhaps shorten" the speech, says Hedges. "I drew it to an early conclusion."

In his speech, he warned that "we become pariahs, tyrants to others weaker than ourselves."

He faulted the United States for lining up in the war on terror "with Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, two leaders who do not shrink in Palestine or Chechnya from carrying out gratuitous and senseless acts of violence. We have become the company we keep."

He said that "just because we have the capacity to wage war it does not give us the right to wage war. This capacity has doomed empires in the past."

And he said, "We will not rid the extremists who hate us with bombs. Indeed, we will swell their ranks. . . . We are far less secure today than we were before we bumbled into Iraq. We will pay for this."

At one point, President Pribbenow took the mic to admonish the crowd: "My friends, one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its ability and its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other's opinions. If you wish to protest the speaker's remarks, I ask that you do it in silence."

Hedges continued, giving his credentials "as someone who knows Iraq, speaks Arabic, and spent seven years in the Middle East." He said he believes that Iraqis will wage "a long, bloody war of attrition" to expel the Americans.

Calling war "the instrument of empire," Hedges cautioned his audience about the way the Pentagon and the media portray U.S. wars today.

"We have lost touch with the essence of war," he said. "War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press--remember in wartime the press is always part of the problem--have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence--death--is hidden from public view."

Said Hedges, "War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics."

When he finished, he was booed lustily.

Rockford College is 157 years old. "Our Vision: To be Jane Addams's College in the Twenty-First Century," its website states, proclaiming its values of "Liberal Arts and Citizenship." (Jane Addams graduated from Rockford College in 1882.)

Carrie Watters broke the story for the Rockford Register Star in a decent May 20 piece badly headlined, "Speaker disrupts RC graduation"--as though it were Hedges's fault.

On May 21, she wrote a follow up, "Democracy, civility debated at college." In that story, she quoted students and faculty who had different reactions to Hedges's speech and the audience's behavior. President Pribbenow was quoted as saying, "I want commencement to be more than a pop speech." But he was also defensive: "We had no intention of turning the commencement into a circus," he said, according to the story. (Pribbenow was unavailable for comment to The Progressive.)

"Students at the meeting requested an apology from college administration," the article said. "A day of accomplishment became a day of debacle."

Hedges told the paper, "You don't invite a speaker like this if you want 'Climb Every Mountain.' " He added that he didn't expect the reaction he got. "Watching it in my own country is heartbreaking," he said.

(To hear the speech, or to read the text, go to rrstar.com and click on "Democracy, civility debated at college." The screen on that page will offer you the transcript and the audio.)