Appropriateness

Saturday I went to a graduation ceremony to see a friend get her PhD. I was looking forward to see the little differences between American "Commencement" ceremonies and the one I had but I felt quite at home with the new university president being and Australian and having Michael Kirby as the keynote speaker.

I've often said how much more I prefer when department colloquia are given by people who make bold claims because it means I don't fall asleep at 4.30 on Friday afternoon. This is even more true when their bold claims are things I disagree with, that way I can sit there trying to work out what exactly is wrong with their claims, rather than just sitting passively.

Apparently most people are not like me because Kirby's speech pissed off a lot of Mid-Westerners. He started off talking about how we need to continue to think more and more globally and told the graduates that an IU education was a good start. He argued that the good work at Indiana University was known around the work and gave the example of Alfred Kinsey. (That was when I knew he was going to mention his own homosexuality.) He emphasised scientific empiricism as the source of all human knowledge (possibly the weak point of his argument) and how Herman B. Wells showed intellectual integrity by standing up for him. At the end of the speech we saw on the screen a lot of people in the audience not applauding, while others gave him a standing ovation (not such a rare thing in the States). I was pleased that he spoke well and managed to make his experiences relevant to IU.

But then in the student newspaper there was an article saying how many people were annoyed by Kirby's address. The thing that stuck me the most was how so many of them were misusing the word "inappropriate". They were using it as a euphemism to mean "don't ask, don't tell". I found it a bit disappointing from a grammatical perspective because there wasn't anything inappropriate: as you can expect, there was no discussion of sex (which might have made me squeamish); there was no advocating for same-sex marriage, which many in the audience could have legitimately disagreed about; the only thing mentioned was the empirical fact that a significant proportion of humans are attracted to members of the same sex. If people can't handle that, they should stop pretending that they disagree about what's appropriate and just admit that they don't like his kind.