(Almost) all smiles

When news of the 2007 commencement speaker selection seeped through campus, neither enthusiasm nor eye rolls occurred to any large extent.\nQuite to the contrary: “Who’s that?”\nThe “Who’s that?” is Tavis Smiley. The “What’s he do?” is hold a respectable position in the media world, publish and contribute to a handful of books, and has a School of Public and Environmental Affairs degree on his wall.\nWe like Tavis Smiley. His speech will undoubtedly be engaging, enjoyable and will certainly not disappoint our bright-eyed, bushy-tailed seniors heading out to conquer the world with their uncomfortable graduation attires mom made them buy.\nAt the same time, we here at the editorial board found we had a fair amount of other candidates in mind. \nFirst and foremost? Subway’s Jared Fogle. We’re visual people. Who isn’t inspired by a skinny Jewish man holding up a pair of size-28 pants next to a 34-inch waist with a David Blaine flourish? Jared could turn his inspirational advice-giving into a big parallel about getting our metaphorical “morbidly obese” lives down to a similarly metaphorical “heart-healthy” level. We could read into it however we wanted and infer anything, from “Maybe I should stop pounding down that whole box of 30 ’stones every weekend” to “Perhaps the job market won’t be as impressed with my 90-second keg stand as those freshmen girls were last night.” Regardless of your inference – your life’s on its way up. \nNot into the whole speech thing? What about an interpretive dance done by Bobby Knight? Just imagine our beloved Robert on stage in his crimson sweater, swinging a chair around at alarming velocities, screaming on occasion about weak-side rebounds and filling gaps in your 2-3 zone.\nOr maybe take the aggression idea off the basketball court and into the stock market? Jim Cramer was just here at Assembly Hall. Surely he wouldn’t mind coming back in May. “Mad Money” is already like “Monday Night Football” meets I-banking – construing phrases like “Know your IPO” as lifelong graduation-pertaining advice just makes everything so much more entertaining. (And let’s be honest: Cooking Uncle Ben’s rice on an investment show with Ben Bernanke’s face on the rice box is hilarious.) The econ department would be happy; the rest of the people in attendance could learn the difference between a “Don’t Buy” and a “Risky.”\nAnd if still none of these is seeming appealing, we decided to just apply pragmatism as a last resort. No one likes painfully long graduations. No one likes hot gyms. No one likes droning speakers at those graduations in those hot gyms. Why not get Dick Cheney? It’s sad but true: We’re just not sure how long his ticker would last up there – at least we wouldn’t be stuck in there too long.\nOn the other hand, we could just pay Fergie and Shakira to get up there and shake it for three hours.