At top 45 colleges, no conservatives invited for commencement: report

Young America's Foundation survey on commencement speakers found that zero conservatives were invited to the top 45 universities.

Who's delivering college commencement addresses this year? Not a conservative.

A report from Young America’s Foundation shows that, of the top 45 schools in the country, not a single institution invited a conservative. When the list is expanded to the top 100 colleges as ranked by US News & World Report, only three speakers are conservative whereas 38 are liberal, a 12:1 ratio.

“America’s top institutions continue to be abandoned as sites of higher education and turned into indoctrination centers,” YAF spokesman Spencer Brown said in a statement. “As if four years of being fed leftist pablum wasn’t enough, too many schools shove their students out the door with one last liberal lesson.”

Over the last decade, top colleges pulled commencement speakers from the Obama administration. During President Trump’s second year in office, UN ambassador Nikki Haley was invited to speak at her alma mater, Clemson University, while Congressman John Lewis, who claims Trump is not a “legitimate” president, is speaking at several different schools in the top 100 list.

The AP touts the presence of Hillary Clinton at Yale University, Sheryl Sandberg at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Amal Clooney at Vanderbilt University. YAF points out voices like conservative philosopher and author Christina Hoff Sommers, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Fox News Channel’s Dana Perino or Harris Faulkner would all make good choices – “but because they don’t fit the Left’s rigid mold, they’re not given the same platform afforded to liberal shills.”

YAF considered 101 schools from the US News & World Report, 37 of which had multiple speakers, 23 had speakers with unclear ideologies, 38 were determined to be liberal, and three were determined to be conservative.

The three conservatives were Cathy Engelbert, DEO of Deloitte, who will speak at Lehigh University, Harold Korell, former CEO of Southwestern Energy Co., who is to speak at the Colorado School of Mining and Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon, who will address Yeshiva University. Haley was not included in the data because Clemson had multiple commencement ceremonies.