AlGore to speak at Carnegie Mellon commencement

Carnegie Mellon ^ | 4/16/2008 | CM PR

[JeffChrz]

Vice President, Environmental Leader to Address Carnegie Mellon Grads

Former U.S. Vice President and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore will address Carnegie Mellon's 2008 graduates at the university's 111th commencement ceremony this May.

"We are very pleased that Al Gore, the nation's leading advocate for the environment, will speak to our graduates at commencement," said Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon. "He is an inspiring and committed leader, whose beliefs fit well with our university, an institution committed to sustainable, green practices. His impassioned campaigns have led him to some of the world's greatest honors. And we are greatly honored to have him at Carnegie Mellon."

Gore is the author of the bestsellers "Earth in the Balance" and "An Inconvenient Truth," which was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary that detailed the devastating effects of global warming.

He is the co-winner, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for "informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change." As a member of that panel, Carnegie Mellon Engineering and Public Policy Professor Ed Rubin also shared the Nobel Prize.

This year's commencement will take place May 18 in Gesling Stadium on the Pittsburgh campus. More information about the ceremony can be found at www.cmu.edu/commencement.

[FreedomPoster]

That’s exactly why I made the comment I did. I expect more from a technological university. GT grad here, and I really hope he doesn’t end up there in the near future.

[JeffChrz]

Is your daughter planning to start an anti-AlGore underground movement? Midnight posting of leaflets all over campus? Painting the fence? Maybe an airhorn to blast whenever AlGore states a falsehood? Don’t disinvite him—challenge his “facts.”

When I was there in 1991, the Student Government tried to ban ROTC for their policies towards gays. Then they put it to a student vote, then weaseled on how the vote would count by school, not by popular vote. Next election, Navy ROTC students ran, partially by write-in, and won a majority of seats.

Jeff C...
BSCompE ‘92

[Ditto]

Thirty or so years ago, I recall attending a 'debate' at the then Carnegie Tech where Ralph Nader with his junk science tour. He debated a young female on the dangers of nuclear power. Before the 'debate' was over, the audience, who were all engineering students, were all laughing their asses off over what an ignorant idiot Nader was. That young lady, who was an engineering grad, took that phoney left wing asshat lawyer apart -- and did it with a smile on her very lovely face. She was brilliant.

I don't know what CMU's student body is like now and I'd suppose that The Goricle could easily mesmerize a gaggle of computer weenies or art history majors, but if they still teach the physical sciences they way they used too, Gore will likely not want to have a Q&A session or he'll end up slinking off campus like Nader did.

[JeffChrz]

Twenty or so years ago, I’d say the engineers and scientists at CMU were apathetic or leaned right:

There were lots of ROTC (at the time, only Navy and AF) students, and most students knew at least one.
Most of the students I knew supported the first Gulf War, which broke out my junior year. My law class that night was canceled because students were too distracted.
The month-long anti-war protest/fast-for-peace in front of Wean Hall by won’t-go-away Vince Eirene (sp?) was largely ignored by the students. It didn’t help that the Gulf War was over by the time the protest started. Some students would order pizzas to be delivered to him. Vince could frequently be found at the university’s Software Engineering Institute protesting the work done there for SDI. He took the protest to Wean, then home to the School of Computer Science, because he claimed the freshman programming courses were used to train people to write software for SDI. The engineering/CS students would joke that we wouldn’t trust our lives to anything written in Pascal.
The Navy ROTC takeover of student government in 1991-92.
There was a semi-regular leftist student rag (not The Tartan) that protested the buildup to the war. I sent it to my friend on a carrier heading to the Gulf. He tossed it into the Indian Ocean.

I heard from a classmate who lives near campus (Squirrel Hill, I think) who said that he has seen the campus move to the left over the years. He attributed it to the lowering of standards to try to make the school appear “elite.” I’d always noticed that the left made the noise, but when they pissed off the right too much, the right acted.

If I remember right, Carnegie Tech’s Vietnam War protest lasted one morning, and ended when the students went to lunch.

Most non-sci/engineering students didn’t have to take any sci/engineering courses to graduate. I used that as a reason to put down alumnus Ted Danson’s environmental pontifications. (I think his specialty was the oceans.)

I didn’t get into politics when I was there—I was too busy being an engineering student or doing buggy. I didn’t start listening to Limbaugh until years later when I was a grad student at Virginia.

[modest proposal]

If someone as irritating as al gore came to my town I would make a point of leaving for the day.

Although I have found it hard to hate al gore ever since the details of how much power he wastes in his mansion were released.

At some point you begin to pity him cause he is a lunatic who probably doesn’t even know what he is doing and why he is doing it anymore.

[DBrow]

I wonder how much he’s getting paid.

[Enchante]

Congratulations to your daughter on her accomplishments.

It’s sad that her big day will forever be blighted by one of the most bombastic and contemptible figures in public life today. She may not know it now, but it won’t be too many years before everyone is laughing and sneering at Albore.

[Enchante]

I’m sorry to say that my 21 year old self would have been excited to have Al Gore speak at my commencement - but my post-30 yr old self finds the prospect repugnant. Not that there might not be some liberals worth hearing (I’m trying to think of a few??) but Al Gore is not one of them.

What’s that saying about hearts and brains? A naive good heart can lead a young person to be a liberal. If someone can get much past 30 and not be thoroughly appalled at all the idiocies and depravities of the world sponsored and protected by liberals, they have no brain.

Of course, the smartest person would be conservative throughout, but I was thoroughly colonized and propagandized by my college profs and turned liberal (from a conservative upbringing) before I began to come to my senses around age 30.

[Nuc1]

I would not attend. They could mail me my degree.

[CitizenM]

And they are the only ones who will probably stay awake! Besides being a bafoon, Gore is the most boring speaker ever. Probably not one graduate will ever recall anything he says to them. For Carnegie Mellon to have selected him probably meant he must have been one of the few left on a list of possible commencement speakers. Kind of like being the last to be picked-up for a team. He never has anything exciting or uplifting to say.

[EagleUSA]

He never has anything exciting or uplifting to say.
:::::::
His only talk is either bashing America (typical treasonous liberal) or plugging his global warming scam. Such a POS.

[toothfairy86]

It’s too bad they couldn’t get Bill Cosby to speak. Cosby donated their new mascot “Scotty” after all.

[JeffChrz]

Actually, Cos gave last year’s address. That’s what inspired him to donate the new mascot.

[rabscuttle385]

My daughter is graduating from CMU on May 18.

Congratulations to your daughter.

Carnegie Mellon is a really tough school to survive.

I turned them down for UVA a few years ago.

[Inwoodian]

“We accept him. One of us. One of us....”

[JeffChrz]

When I was home this past Sunday, attempting to kill the weeds in my backyard, I got a call from my alma mater. My wife said they had been calling all week. Sure enough, it was a student calling to ask me for a donation. I let him start his scripted scripted introduction, about how Carnegie Mellon is recognized as one of the best universities in the country, how it is in the top 25 schools overall, and its engineering school, business school and electrical and computer engineering departments were in the top 10 in the country and how my donation of just $21 would continue the prestige for future students.
I stopped him and started my tirade. I don’t remember all the details, but I told him how disappointed I was in my alma mater and asked how a school that is so highly regarded in science and engineering would invite, and pay, former VP Al Gore to give the commencement address and presumably perpetuate a scientific fraud from which he personally has profited. I promised that I wouldn’t give another cent and I have no idea what the school could do to redeem itself in my eyes.
I didn’t wait for a response—I hung up. I had weeds to kill—lots of rain this past winter in Arizona meant lots of growth this spring. I’m sure, after pausing to process my tirade (I figured I went at it for 2 minutes or so), he would have blabbered something about Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize (which a CMU professor officially shared as part of the IPCC) and Oscar awards. I would have said something like:
If global warming were really proven as fact, Gore would have won a Nobel Prize for Physics.
In recent history, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to an Islamic terrorist (Arafat), a literary fraud (Rigoberta Menchu) and a bribing government official (Korean president Kim Dae-Jung). Others seem to have won an annual “Why I Hate the United States So Much” essay contest. And don’t get me started on the incompetent UN and its committees.
The people who vote on the Oscar awards are rich idiots who will jump into anything trendy and whose ideas of doing something for the environment include burning lots of fuel in a private jet to go to remote parts of the earth to commune with primitive people—people who would give anything to get out of the filthy, disease-ridden jungle that they had the misfortune to be born into—and purchasing a hybrid Prius to put into their garage, next to their Bentley, Porsche, Escalade and Hummer H1.
In retrospect, I should have waited for the response. Maybe they didn’t get my point and they’ll call back again.
I apologize to you and your daughter for not making a donation that would have saved you a penny on last year’s tuition.

[MurryMom]

...my donation of just $21 would continue the prestige for future students.

You are too cheap to donate $21 to one of the country's finest universities, the same one that gave you a degree years ago so that you have a nice job that allows time to kill weeds on a Saturday afternoon, and you expect the university to call you back after a helpless CMU student was forced to listen to your unsolicited tirade?

Sounds too delusional to me. Maybe you should give back your degree.

[JeffChrz]

I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe I expected more out of a university that demanded so much out of me. The choice of commencement speaker wasn’t the poor kid’s fault.