Like my colleagues, I celebrate debate and discourse at Boston College Law School, both inside and outside the classroom.  But such celebration does not mean that individual professors or individual students need be neutral about legal controversies.  Nor does it mean that the institution itself must refrain from having or announcing a point of view.  We teach and write as if what we say matters, and it does.

One of the reasons I oppose the invitation to Attorney General Mukasey is because of what such invitation says not only to our graduates but to the public and to the Attorney General himself.  Implicit in every invitation to be a graduation speaker is the notion that the person can be held out as a role model.  Of course there is wide range of people who can fit that bill.  But I cannot in good conscience support holding out Mukasey as such an example in these times. I have every reason to believe that the Attorney General is a man of utmost personal integrity, and certainly his career has been exemplary.  But I do not think that success alone, even a rise to the top of our profession, merits an invitation as graduation speaker.  He has become — because of the duties of his office, perhaps — the chief apologist for the illegal and immoral interrogation practices of the Bush administration.   But as any lawyer can refuse to take a case, he could have refused the post.  One of the things I would expect this law school to stand for is the notion that a lawyer cannot uncouple what one does at the office from who one is as a human being and a member of society.  It is not unfair to hold him accountable for the views and practices of an administration when it is part of his job to defend those views and practices.

This is not to say that one cannot be a good person within a less-than-good system.  But I believe we live in a time where such rationalization deserves close scrutiny.  Our nation’s government has tortured people in our name.  And silence in the face of such inhumanity is not something I would have this school congratulate and honor.

These graduation invitations are not only for the benefit of the schools and their graduates.  They are also prized opportunities for the invitees, who receive the opportunity to address what is essentially a captive audience, along with the attendant media attention.  Moreover, they receive the psychological and political validation that comes with an invitation from a school with the prestige of Boston College.  In inviting him to address our graduation we are offering a bit of our institutional good will to him, his office, and — now that he has become identified with water boarding — to the administration’s illegal activities.  If our invitation emboldens or comforts him or his colleagues anywhere in the administration in their efforts to subvert the law and human rights, then it is a truly unfortunate use of our institution’s fine name.