Today, The Washington Times has the headline “College Veer Left for ‘07 Speakers”.

Commencement addresses at the nation’s top colleges and universities this year mostly were given by left-leaning or Democratic speakers with few conservatives snagging the honor, according to a report released yesterday by the Young America’s Foundation.

The conservative group conducts the review each year using the U.S. News & World Report ranking of top schools. This year, it found left-leaning speakers outnumbered conservatives by a ratio of 8-to-1.

First of all … is this news? Does The Times think that it is breaking some great unknown scandal regarding the dominant leaning of university administrations? Second of all … I don’t think there was any veering that occurred. This year’s speakers are merely a continuation of the same trend.

When I graduated from the University of Maryland, the commencement speaker was former Senator Bill Bradley. Wow, do I wish that Red Bull had been around in those days! The year before that, the speaker was First Lady (at that time) Hillary Clinton. I continued to attend graduation ceremonies in the years that followed, as I worked on campus. Our treat in 1998 was Secretary of State Madeline Allbright and 1999 brought us a dual performace by Carville and Matalin (Carville is clearly the stronger speaker and more of the true believer between the two).

I was an officer with the College Democrats during my wayward youth and I was amused with my friend who was the president of the College Republicans (his name was Nathan … must be something about that name and being a Republican … I wonder if the guy who made the hot dogs was a conservative) as he wrote angry letters to the campus newspaper about the bias in speakers. Now I get it. Despite the example provided by our current president, there are well-spoken conservatives who would make engaging commencement speakers.

I will say that YAF got a little overenthusiastic when looking to label speakers with the “liberal” tag. While Brian Williams and Bill Gates may very well carry pocket copies of The Communist Manifesto and have a swimsuit photo of Hillary Clinton hanging over their beds, they are professionals who I don’t consider primarily political in nature. But, the overall conclusion made by YAF, that college speakers are overwhelmingly liberal in ideology, cannot be denied.