While many 2005 graduates complained of the relative lack of celebrity of UPenn President Amy Gutmann, our commencement speaker in May, what graduation attendees should have found far more disheartening was the content of her speech.

Gutmann’s primary argument was that “mutual respect” is the most important quality of democracy. “We need massive doses of deliberation and mutual respect if we are going to move our society and world to a better place,” she said. She started with an example of lack of respect with a reference to today’s “smash-mouth culture in which extremists dominate public debate.”

Gutmann is correct to criticize the relative uselessness of today’s talk-show yelling. But the debate isn’t a farce because it’s dominated by extremists; rather, the “public debate” we hear today is pointless because it represents a very narrow set of beliefs, generally held by people in power, and rarely reflects the range of American opinion.

Take the current issue of the American occupation of Iraq. Thirty-three percent of American adults believe that we should remove all our troops; an additional 25 percent believe that we should remove at least some troops immediately (CBS News Poll, 9/6-7/05). Yet turn on your television – or even read a newspaper – and you’re unlikely to see anyone calling for even a reduction in troops. The pundits and elected officials argue only about the specifics of how the occupation should be conducted and how long it might last. Let’s be clear: extremists do not dominate the public debate. People in power – with a very narrow set of ideas – do.

Not that the trend of centrists – rather than the extremists, as Gutmann claimed – dominating the debate is anything new. Gutmann lauded the public debates over the U.S. Constitution between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists as being respectful, fruitful, and ultimately successful, with its creation of The Bill of Rights.

Forgetting for a moment that our nation only formed after a bloody (and rather disrespectful) civil war with England, let’s consider the scope of the debate between the Founding Fathers. While there were two sides with clear ideological differences, the discussion was limited to a handful of property-owning white men. Had slaves, women, or poor people been allowed at the table, demanding equal rights, Gutmann’s happy consensus would have been seriously complicated. The debate might have even gotten ugly – but maybe those excluded parties would have been treated as citizens much earlier in history. Mutually respectful dialogue is much easier when most people are left out, or when it’s defending the status quo.

More personally offensive was Gutmann’s attempt to use Wesleyan’s United Student-Labor Action Coalition to prove that mutually respectful dialogue is preferable to confrontation. In 2000, USLAC worked with janitors to pressure the University to improve working conditions. Early efforts to engage in “reasoned arguments” with the administration failed; after four months of petitions, letters, meeting attempts, and rallies, President Bennet was still unwilling to even consider the idea of signing a workers’ Code of Conduct.

So while the students would have liked to “respectfully [engage] the administration with reasoned arguments,” thereby helping to “bring about the adoption of new employment standards,” as Gutmann claimed they did, in actuality the administration only paid attention after the students escalated their tactics (“USLAC prevails after sit-in at admission office”, The Argus, 4/7/2000).

After students had occupied a university building for 30 hours, Bennet finally agreed to sign the Code of Conduct that still influences working conditions at Wesleyan today. “It’s sad we had to get so drastic and go through so much to get President Bennet to recognize the workers,” USLAC member Martha Paz ’02 told the Argus at the time. Had the students limited themselves to the respectful debate that Gutmann advocates, janitors at Wesleyan might still be making just above the minimum wage.

In our four years at Wesleyan, Bennet told us time and again to limit ourselves to “civilized discourse” so as to silence views with which he disagreed. The graduating class saw that on issue after issue – from the demands for an Office of the Multicultural Dean to chalking to gender-neutral housing – the administration that so promotes “civilized discourse” has actually undermined mutually respectful dialogue by making closed-door decisions and only taking token student input. We are disappointed that as his farewell gesture, Bennet brought Amy Gutmann to implore us one last time to kindly ask those in power to make changes, else we risk being too “extreme.”