I would never send my kid to the New School to sit near the likes of Jean Sara Roche

Narrow-minded liberals show McCain disrespect. You get a better a shake at Falwell's house at Liberty Baptist College. At least the fundamentalists appear to have an open mind by listening to an opposing point of view.

Some 1,200 students and faculty signed petitions asking the university president, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, to rescind the invitation. Petitioners said McCain's support for the Iraq war and opposition to gay rights and legal abortion do not keep with the prevailing views on campus.

Kerrey, a Democrat who served in the Senate with McCain and, like McCain, is a decorated Vietnam War veteran, addressed the controversy almost immediately after the 2,700 graduates and thousands of other parents and friends filed into Madison Square Garden for the ceremony.

"Sen. McCain, you have much to teach us," Kerrey said to a smattering of boos and hisses. He urged students to exercise the open-mindedness he said was at the heart of the university's progressive history.

But Kerrey's remarks were immediately overshadowed by those of Jean Sara Rohe, one of two distinguished seniors invited by the university's deans to address the graduates.
Beginning by singing a wistful folk tune calling for world peace, Rohe announced she had thrown out her prepared remarks to address the McCain controversy directly.

"The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," Rohe proclaimed to loud cheers, with McCain sitting just a few feet away.

She added that she knew what McCain would be saying to the graduates since he had promised to deliver the same speech he gave at Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University last weekend and Columbia University on Tuesday.

"He will tell us we are young and too naive to have valid opinions," Rohe said. "I am young and though I don't possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction."

Yes know-it-all Rohe makes her debut on the world stage. Singing folks tunes will certinaly get us Osama's head. What do they teach at this famed school that was a refuge for exiles fleeing totalitarianism? Not much in terms of intellectual heft.