Yale Daily News

er, "The Great Recession" is not just Buckley's name for it

"Buckley’s speech appeared to be received warmly and he earned a standing ovation from the thousands gathered on the sea of white chairs aligned on Old Campus."

Thousands? Really?

I would have loved to watch a video of this.

Does anyone seriously still take Buckley Jr. seriously? What his speech should have been about is how wrong he was about the election and how sorry he is to have misled so many of his fans in voting for Obama.

There are at least 4000 people assembled during class day: ~1300 graduating seniors + at least 2 family members there to see each one (~2600). That would be thousands, yes.

well... 1300 graduates + undergrads who are still around + friends and family (figure at least one per grad) = more than 2000 = thousands.

+ there are almost 18,000 chairs on old campus and @ least 2/3 of them were full. again... thousands.

Yes, thousands. Over a thousand seniors and one to four parents each, plus siblings, grandparents, doting aunts.

You can watch a video of this.
http://www.yale.edu/commencement/html/video_stream.html

Well, maybe one had to be there.

I DID happen to be there in 1975 for Chris' first Class Day speech. He's too modest ... and therefore revisionist (odd, that). His '75 speech wasn't really shocking, it was just bad. Worse, it was "bad" attempting to conceal itself as "shocking." That's really bad: as bad as that quote from the bathroom wall. Fortunately for everyone, he did better, later. Épater la bourgeoisie, Chris! But as a general rule, it's best not to include a bathroom graffito whose entire effect is lost, but whose entire meaning preserved, when its embedded obscenity is replaced with the word "goofed."

It's also best not to bring it up again 34 years on. I don't mean to be a curmudgeon, but at least as it lies unconscious on the internet page, this year's speech is neither bad nor shocking. Just predictable and banal. But maybe the effect was all context and living nuance? Maybe one had to be there? Maybe one had to be there in the full effervescent spirit of the Day with a couple of good stiff gin and tonics already under one's belt? Worse could happen. I'll try watching some of the replay.

It was a totally fine example of the kind of address he intended it to be...a bit more lite than some would have hoped, perhaps, but less egregiously so than Tony Blair's and Anderson Cooper's recent contributions to the event.

@#4 - OMG, yes, Obama is soooooo terrible. We're going to be become such a socialist & fascist country because of him. George W. Bush was AWESOME - this country had no problems when he was our president. We were so perfect!!! [Did I capture your thinking pretty accurately?]

Buckley's speech was funny, I'm sure he delivered it well. Incidentally, #4 Buckley IS a Republican, just not someone representative of Republican leadership...not sure who you wanted, but I doubt most of the graduating class and their parents would want to be subjected to Rush Limbaugh or Karl Rove. Sorry.

Hooray for the Continuing Yale Buckley Tradition, whichever turns and bends it encounters along the trails and byways from the mid 20th Century to the mid 21st.

Adventuresome or even philosophical conservatism emanating from Yale and New Haven now meets with greater attention as we would-be Southern liberals take note of more and more "liberal consensus" that regulation of the press here in the "progressive South" either by our own state legislatures or by other larger media organizations usually based in the Northeast is a constitutional breach which is simply to be condoned to assure that we "learn to think right" amidst the "Southern Ivies," whever these institutions happen to be.

Yale can continue to be at least one Ivy League university which prides itself on being attuned to the perceptions and concerns of folks from all walks of life across the country.

David P. McKnight
Durham, N.C.

Cute and sometimes funny in a canned corporate kind of way, but someone should tell Mr. Buckley that the president's name is no longer "Bush" and that "topical" political references need to be kept updated.

It is almost midsummer of President Obama's first year and there is no longer any need to constantly reference the past administration, usually in disingenuous fashion.

We know already that we have elected the first post-racial president whose personal profile represents a landmark change from previous presidents.

And we don't need any more generic nouns like hope/change in lieu of honesty about a lot of things: Our annual borrowing may reach $2 trillion; states are going bankrupt; massive infusions of borrowed cash must be paid back and cannot masquerade the prior ineptness of business and labor models in banking and the auto industry that sent firms into bankruptcy. Even higher taxes won't begin to cover the cost of proposed massive new spending programs that are unprecedented. All the prior demonized Bush anti-terrorism protocols have been kept with mere hope and change veneers.

In other words, rather than explaining the bleak choices before us and explaining why his preferences have the best chance of succeeding, Obama has so far reduced his presidency to two themes: "Bush did it" and "I'm not your normal white male President." If he keeps this monotony up, at some point even the comedians are going to notice the predictability.

Perhaps even Chris Buckley will notice? Maybe even the cheering Class of '09 will notice as they recall wildly applauding a Secretary of State who had absolutely nothing to say about North Korea's first successful nuclear test? Always sound Dean Miller noted that good education is expensive and worth it, but Yale tuition is just a down payment.

Ugh. 'We are all profoundly different but we stand strongest when we find common ground.'

... You would hope that after 4 years and $200,000 one would be able to reflect back on one's time at Yale without indulging in the most trite and banal cliches...

From a student's perspective, Buckley delivered.

It was a great speech--appealing to both parents and kids. I sat through PM Blair's at my own class day, and while I thought Blair's speech was good, it paled in comparison to Buckley. Yes, I'm able to say that I heard a former PM speak at my class day, but '09 got a much better speech.

I was a bit angry about Buckley Jr. having been selected as the Class Day speaker because of issues related to the alleged abandonment of his non-marital child. After hearing him speak, I found him witty and engaging and think there has got to be much more to the story and the veracity of the report of abandonment may be in question. I found myself laughing at some of the comments he made during his speech. He can't be so bad after all.

#14: Sometimes something is repeated often because it just so happens to be true. The negative modifier cliched is usually only applied by people who disagree with that wisdom. I hope that in the future you can make a point with your comment rather than insult the previous commenter with a banal and unoriginal insult. Better luck next time.

He's written a wonderful Memoriam to his parents, replete with rare photos. Never knew his mother but knew his dad casually, while working for that magazine that liberals hate. Chris is talented, as well as personable--a chip off the old...