Novelist E.L. Doctorow devoted most of his 20-minute commencement speech at Hofstra University to bashing President Bush’s foreign and domestic policies and essentially calling him a liar.
The booing started almost immediately, according to Newsday:
Booing that came mainly from the crowd in the stands became so intense that Doctorow stopped speaking at one point, showing no emotion as he stood silently and listened to the jeers. Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz intervened, and called on the audience to allow him to finish. He did, although some booing persisted.
The rather-telling part of all this is that the booing came mostly from the crowd of assembled parents and friends of the graduates, and to some extent from the students whose graduation was being hijacked by this inane and thoughtless fool. But “some students and most of the faculty responded with a standing ovation,” the newspaper reports.
Most of the faculty. Oh, well, strike another possibility off the Little Conqueror/Little General matriculation list.
