Edited by author 06-18-2002 10:59 AM
I'm a staff member (former student) at Ohio State and this is simply untrue. I work with a woman who graduated this quarter and she (the group of graduating seniors attending commencement, rather) was told by school officials during rehearsal that if someone heckled the president they would be removed from the stadium and expelled (and not graduating). You could silently protest (there were a number of hand-written Turn Your Back on Bush flyers posted on campus in the week before commencement, http://www.turnyourbackonbush.com/) and as long as you weren't obstructing another's view of the event, you were fine. According to my co-worker, this is what a number of people did. Neither were these people approached by the police nor were they hassled by other students.

So, I think the school administration did do a pretty shady job of strong-arming students into behaving, but they absolutely DID NOT threaten students that they would be removed if they engaged in silent protest.

I don't remember Clinton's speech being 'disrupted' in any significant way (reading the transcript, there is one incident), but you may recall the 'town hall meeting' in which Madeleine Albright and several Clinton staff members were essentially shouted down throughout the course of the event. http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/feb/02-19-98/news/news1.html
This was, of course, quite an embarassment to the university.

I'm sure activists will disagree with me, but I would venture that a commencement address is not the time or place to heckle someone. Again, students were NOT removed from the stadium for non-obstructing silent protest, ONLY if they disrupted the ceremony. Commencement is a huge deal at OSU, and tens of thousands of friends and family members of the graduates routinely attend. They've come to see their child graduate from college, not to hear someone's political grievances.

That this level of disinformation has sprung from ONE post on a leftist message board, filled with factual errors (the original author mentions '4 years and 80,000 dollars' -- in-state osu students pay around $2000 per quarter for tuition, there are three quarters in a year so that would be $24,000 for four years) by a person who doesn't even sound to be a student, is a little disheartening.