Poor Juan Williams. Gets no love as the token liberal at FoxNews and now Ursinus College doesn’t want him to give a Commencement speech because they don’t want to hand him a Honorary Degree – PB/TK
Disinvitation Season Begins – By Colleen Flaherty February 14, 2017
Ursinus College hasn’t yet named its 2017 commencement speaker, but one thing is clear: it won’t be Juan Williams. The journalist and longtime Fox News contributor and co-host was approached by the college’s president to possibly address graduates and receive an honorary degree but was eliminated as a candidate after faculty members objected
“Once it became clear that faculty had reservations — I spoke to people from different parts of the college and different parts of the political spectrum and encountered not one who thought inviting Williams would be a good move — our choice of commencement speaker had to be reconsidered,” Jonathan Marks, a professor of politics at Ursinus, said via email.
Tom Yencho, a college spokesman, confirmed that Williams was approached but will not be speaking. A committee was formed last month to review speaker nominations and the overall selection process, he said. Ursinus is “continuing to work toward developing a more streamlined and collaborative selection process, which we anticipate to have in place by the end of this semester.”
Planned commencement speakers have been disinvited from or backed out of various talks in recent years amid pressure from campus groups — usually students. Robert Birgeneau, former chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, canceled his speech at Haverford College in 2014, for example, after some 40 students and instructors asked him to apologize for a 2011 incident in which police injured protesters on his campus.
Williams, however, apparently faced fierce opposition from faculty members, who were also asserting a right to weigh in on honorary degrees before they are offered. Their concerns stem from a well-documented sexual harassment case against him dating back to his time at The Washington Post and charges of plagiarizing parts of a column written for The Hill in 2013. Faculty members say that Williams’s public responses to those allegations fell short of contrition. In the first case, Williams initially claimed that he made “attempts at being friendly” but later apologized publicly for verbal conduct he knew was “wrong.” The Hill eventually updated Williams’s 2013 article to include a “previously omitted attribution,” but he did not cop to plagiarism.
Continue to insidehighered.com article: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/02/14/juan-williams-out-commencement-speaker-ursinus
