What happened the last time someone spoke about politics at the University of Alabama’s commencement

By Chelsea Bailey, CNN

(CNN) — As Jim Stephens approached the podium at the University of Alabama’s main graduation ceremony in May 2007, the United States was entering its fourth year of the Iraq War, with troops across the region – and the death toll – surging.

For Stephens, a former soldier who’d become the chairman of his family’s information technology business, EBSCO Industries, the carnage was unconscionable.

“War, to me, is the most terrible event that we can engage in as humanity,” he said this week, some 18 years later. “I wanted (graduates) to think about that.”

So, after encouraging the students to “have values, be judgmental and … find the strength to live them,” Stephens challenged his audience to think critically about the US’ role on the global stage, contemporary news articles reported.

“We can relate easily to the family pain from the killing of innocents at Virginia Tech,” he said from the lectern, referring to the deadly mass shooting a month earlier that had killed 32 people.

But, he continued, “Fifty civilians died in Iraq that very day.”

“We are asking whether this is good global citizenship. Most importantly, we are asking: Is this the behavior of a good and virtuous society?”

Some in the audience of capped-and-gowned young adults furrowed their brows. Others considered booing. Stephens’ pivot into global politics – which he underscored at both a morning and an afternoon ceremony – felt out of line to some in a moment that should have been devoted to celebrating grads’ accomplishments.

Since then, the University of Alabama hasn’t had a speaker as part of its main commencement.

That is, until this week.

President Donald Trump is set to deliver an address to the class of 2025 during an event Thursday kicking off the university’s graduation weekend. And even before he arrives in Tuscaloosa, politics is already back at the fore.

While Trump’s speech is ticketed and optional for graduates, it has drawn the ire of the state’s NAACP and the university’s College Democrats, who plan to hold a “Tide Against Trump” counter-rally featuring Beto O’Rourke, the ex-congressman who’s earned national prominence trying make statewide Democratic inroads in Texas. An online petition opposing Trump’s address has garnered 25,000 signatures.

Simply by being president, Trump has waded into the same fraught waters Stephens did back in 2007 by putting politics at the forefront of commencement weekend. What he says may further make waves across the ideological spectrum.

For his part, Stephens, now 86, stands by his decision to toe the third rail of American commencement addresses and, all those years ago, encourage graduates to truly think about what it means to be a citizen of the United States and the world, he said.

“It’s a junction time – all these students go off in enormously different directions,” he told CNN. “I wanted to reach them personally … and then I wanted to speak about our society and what was going on in our nation.”

‘Honestly speak truth to actual power’

Back in 2007, from his seat in the first row of graduates, Daniel Maguire frowned in confusion when Stephens started talking about the war in Iraq.

“We’re just kind of looking back and forth at each other, like, ‘Is this happening? Is he really going there, at graduation?’” Maguire recalled to CNN.

Protesting a commencement speaker’s address was becoming something of a rite of passage, raising the stakes for those brave enough to step up to the podium and share their advice.

“Should we … should we boo?” Maguire and his fellow graduates wondered.

Maguire decided against it, he said. But, Stephens recalled, several people in the audience did just that.

The more Maguire thought about the ceremony that weekend, he said, the more “irritated” he became. So, he penned an op-ed for the local paper – and left a phone a message for Stephens at his office the next Monday.

“Mr. Stephens is the CEO of a large, successful corporation, and if he wants to disseminate his political opinion, he has plenty of avenues to do that,” Maguire recalled telling Stephens’ assistant. “He didn’t need to essentially hijack a commencement ceremony.”

Stephens was surprised by that sort of backlash, he told CNN. But his speech had the desired effect: It sparked a dialogue.

“We the people need to try to be informed. We should seek to be informed, and we should have an opinion,” he said. “I didn’t seek to overly persuade, but I did state my views … I wanted those views to give that group in the audience something to think about.”

After graduating with his master’s degree in 2007, Maguire began his career in higher education in the registrar’s office of the University of Alabama’s business school.

Since then, the university has had no traditional commencement speakers, electing instead to call the names of each graduate at its commencement ceremonies.

Maguire isn’t sure whether it was Stephens’ speech the prompted the pivot, and University of Alabama officials declined to say. But now – with 18 years of hindsight and after living abroad – his thoughts on the 2007 graduation address have evolved.

“Nowadays, I would probably agree with most of what Mr. Stephens said, particularly (with) the US throwing its weight around the world,” Maguire told CNN.

This year, more than 6,000 students are expected to participate in graduation ceremonies, according to the university. Maguire still stands by his original position that commencement is not the place for politicking, he said – with one caveat.

“If you had the opportunity to honestly speak truth to actual power,” he said, “you should take it.”

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