Two achievements mark excellence in a commencement speaker: connection to audience and timeliness of message.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan enjoys both. She should be Hillsdale’s 2018 commencement speaker.
Noonan wrote speeches for a man revered — and immortalized in statue — on Hillsdale’s campus: Ronald Reagan. She wrote his Challenger explosion speech — one of the top 10 most powerful speeches of the 20th century. In the speech, Reagan encouraged children not to despair at the death of the astronauts, but to be inspired by their courage.
“The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” Reagan said, with Noonan’s help. “It belongs to the brave.”
Noonan composed speeches for the American people, and she also draws on experience with college students, having taught at Yale and New York University.
In her weekly Wall Street Journal column, Noonan combines candor with kindness, balancing firm conservative beliefs with a generous understanding of the political landscape. Her speech cuts through noise, offering something more powerful than information: truth.
“You belong to something. It’s called: us,” she petitioned readers in a June column on heightening political divisions. “We have responsibilities to each other.”
This year Noonan won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary by “rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”
Recalling common interest, pointing toward a shared goal, bringing together a diverse group of people: This is what a commencement speaker should do.
Having written almost a dozen books, Noonan is the kind of thinker who can describe the social and political climate of America without wallowing in gloom. She’ll tell us where we are and show us where we can be.
Noonan aligns philosophically with the college, and she has the experience and eloquence to articulate it.
The timeliness of her message comes from her perspective and place in the conservative movement. This year brought us—among other products of modern feminism—the Women’s March, pop-culture fawning over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and divisive catch phrases like, “The future is female.” For a graduating class that is more than half female, Noonan is the best candidate to remind us that despite what we will hear when we leave: the future is for all.
Hillsdale College has not hosted a female commencement speaker since talk radio host Laura Schlessinger in 2002.
We shouldn’t choose commencement speakers for their gender, race, or any other aspect of their identity. We should choose them for their ideas and accomplishments. In this way, we reinforce the aim of the college, stated on its website as a commitment “to stimulating students’ intellectual curiosity, to encouraging the critical, well-disciplined mind, and to fostering personal growth.”
Despite being hounded to associate with a misguided group because of her gender, Noonan has the courage and the fortitude to fight against the tide. All students can learn from that.
Commencement offers graduates an opportunity to remember why they attended this school and anticipate where they will go next. For this we need a speaker to connect with us and to distill eternal truths for the present time. Noonan could accomplish both.
Madeline Fry is a senior studying French.
