Ryan Seacrest is an American hero.

It's college commencement season, which means it's that delightful time of year when everyone baking in the midday sun catches heatstroke while desperately trying not to nod off during a lengthy speech about changing the world, living your dreams, yada, yada, yada. Commencement speeches are a lot like those "inspirational" quotes your annoying friend on Facebook posts, only fifteen minutes longer:

This should inspire you to try and use a comma better.

Some colleges and universities actually pay for their commencement speakers though. The idea of an honorary degree from, say, a Columbia or Yale is enough to lure most anyone to speak for free. Lesser known universities, especially state universities, can't woo big names though, not unless the wooing comes with a briefcase of cash.

Take, for instance, the University of Houston, which paid retired astronaut hero Scott Kelly $35,000 this year to speak at their commencement, according to the Associated Press. This was practically fun money for the school, which spent $166,000 last year on Matthew McConaughey to speak, plus an extra $9,500 for his airfare. To be fair, McConaughey donated the speaking fee, but the airfare cost wasn't, and the school still ponied up the fee regardless if it went to charity.

Likewise, Kean University in New Jersey reportedly spent $40,000 on its 2016 commencement speaker, Brandon Stanton. If you know who Brandon Stanton is, odds are you're his grandmother--and that's just adorable. (Hey, Grandma!) For the rest of America, Brandon Stanton is the founder of HONY--the website/social media creation better known as Humans of New York. Kean University also spent an additional $40,000 on having its own retired astronaut speak, too. Mark Kelly, the twin brother of Scott Kelly, was Kean's second speaker--proving once and for all that being the second fiddle sibling doesn't mean you get the second fiddle speaking fee.

"Our students worked very hard, and they deserve it," said Margaret McCorry, a spokeswoman for Kean University, to the Associated Press. "It makes their commencement just that much more memorable." Imagine how memorable it might be if you actually knew who the person was beforehand!

The University of Texas at Austin paid $3,300 for its alumnus, Darren Walker, to come back last year to speak. Walker is the president of the second largest philanthropic organization in America, The Ford Foundation. The $3,300 was spent on Walker's two night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel, which covered a $450 spa tab. Philanthropy apparently starts at home.

The University of Georgia paid $22,000 to charter a private plane for ABC news anchor Amy Robach to come on down. This is reasonable when you consider only 216,000 people fly in and out of Atlanta every day at the world's busiest airport, so it's not as if she could have found a Delta or United flight connecting there.

All of this brings us to Ryan Seacrest. The most ubiquitous human being in America is apparently also the most sensible about commencement matters. This past week he returned to his alma mater, the University of Georgia, free of charge to speak at their graduation.

Whereas Toni Morrison once charged Rutgers University $30,000 for her to scowl for twenty minutes, Ryan Bleepin' Seacrest flashed his polished Chiclets for free--and was probably more memorable to a bunch of twenty-somethings in the audience than Toni Morrison will ever be.

But imagine how much Ryan Seacrest could charge if he was a semi-famous retired astronaut.

TRIGGER WARNING: This blog post might incite a fear of words.

If, in your lifetime as a reader, you've ever read Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Chinua Achebe, Mark Twain, or others, and didn't feel emotionally harmed in the process, you might have escaped a horrible fate--of feeling.

According to the New York Times, colleges are struggling with requests from students (and others) to affix a 'Trigger Warning' in a syllabus regarding texts which might instigate an adverse reaction or emotional trauma to the reading material--for any reason. Colleges and universities like Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and George Washington University have all instituted rules regarding these 'Trigger Warnings,' which has some people concerned that things have gotten out of hand.

Says the Times:


"The most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide)."

Chinua Achebe realizes he just triggered himself.

As the tide toward being overly-sensitive to literary texts gets excessive, professors--who are usually overtly sensitive to texts' potential to offend--are now fighting back. Oberlin College released a guide which suggested professors mark up a syllabus with 'Trigger Warnings' in case any text might offend a student.

Continues the Times:





“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the [Oberlin] guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”


If you've experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, and suicide in your life, not only do you need to reexamine what you did to piss off a variety of religious deities, but you're also going to be a millionaire once you get that memoir published. But I digress.

Pause for a moment to think of Oberlin's logic regarding Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart." Achebe's novel is something "everyone in the world should read," but--hey, not everyone everyone. Just everyone with a pathological inability to feel human emotion.

Since being emotionally cold and distant to literature isn't really how reading works, some are arguing against 'Trigger Warnings,' like Jill Filipovic at London's The Guardian, who writes:


"College isn't exactly the real world either, but it's a space for kinda-sorta adults to wade neck-deep into art, literature, philosophy, and the sciences, to explore new ideas, to expand their knowledge of the cultural canon, to interrogate power and to learn how to make an argument and to read a text. It is, hopefully, a space where the student is challenged and sometimes frustrated and sometimes deeply upset, a place where the student's world expands and pushes them to reach the outer edges – not a place that contracts to meet the student exactly where they are."


Except college is becoming an intellectual vacuum--at least in the humanities departments--where professors fear the wrath of offending students with literary choices, even if those choices lead to enlightening discussion and collective examination of broader topics by the entire class.

Don't believe me? Professor Marc Blecher tells the Times:


“If I were a junior faculty member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified. [...] Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards, and create a very tortuous process for anyone.”


"Torture."

And, so, the triggering cycle begins.  A book triggers an unpleasant emotional response in a student...who files a complaint with the university...who sends the faculty member to meetings and judicial boards...who decide the professor was egregious with their literary selection by not realizing the depth of triggering response potential...so the board places the professor on some sort of academic probation...causing the faculty member to be traumatized (because they aren't tenured and are only making $32,000 a year without health benefits, and the rent's due)...so the following semester the teacher can't bring themselves to create a class syllabus with any meaningful text...and are frightened by the sight of stacks of blank syllabi...and, thus, incapacitated and incapable of doing their job, so their employment is terminated.

The circle of life.



photo: mije.org

Rutgers professor suspended after admitting to students he doesn't know what he's teaching.

After being assigned by Rutgers University to teach a class called "Human Aggression," a subject matter out of his realm of expertise, anthropology professor Robert Trivers admitted his lack of confidence in the subject matter to his students. For being so honest, the university suspended Trivers with pay.

In an interview with The Daily Targum, Trivers rebuked Rutger's behavior. "You would think the University would show a little respect for my teaching abilities on subjects that I know about and not force me to teach a course on a subject that I do not at all master,” he said.

In the meantime, Rutgers has assigned a different professor to teach the class, one which administrators emailed students saying he "regularly teaches [the class] and did so during the fall 2013 semester, so he is ready to step in without missing a beat."

This is a systemic way of teaching human aggression for a class called "Human Aggression." Academics getting catty, passive-aggressive emails, backstabbing. It's grad level stuff.