NU grads say Daley too small for big day

Hmmm, I don't who they think is more important. A big city mayor is important, but good lord Julia Louis Dreyfuss from Seinfeld is more important that Mayor Daley. What are these Northwestern kids on anyway! Tribune:

Mayor Richard Daley may be a political powerhouse in Chicago, but just over the city line in Evanston, some seniors at Northwestern University think he's too, well, parochial to be their commencement speaker.

Students say they feel let down because the choice, announced this week, doesn't carry the cachet of recent speakers, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, or even last year's speaker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus of "Seinfeld."

Some were hoping for the Dalai Lama.

"If your goal in the speaker selection process was to make graduating seniors happy about leaving this university, then mission accomplished," Matthew Braslow of Vernon Hills wrote on Tuesday to Northwestern President Henry Bienen. Braslow also said he will not attend.

"Matthew, grow up," Bienen wrote back Wednesday morning. Bienen's e-mail added: "You also sound like a very unhappy person. I am sorry for that. Hopefully things will improve for you over the years."

But other seniors also seem to be taking the choice as a personal slight, calling the decision to honor Daley everything from "lame" to "a letdown" in interviews with the Tribune and in some of nearly 200 messages posted on The Daily Northwestern student newspaper's Web site.

"The people who are vocal are disappointed. If it's a majority of people who are happy, it's a silent majority," said senior Abe Rakov, who was editor of The Daily Northwestern until March. "Almost everyone who has spoken out has been against it."

I could comment that they could do a lot worse than Daley but it appears that they had already!

Although this story is negative, congrats to all the graduates this year. I hope your time in school wherever you went was worth it. Perhaps I should have said this in a different post. Perhaps I will when we have graduations for high schoolers and elementary schoolers.