Slippery Rock University
Former president of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania (2002-2012)
PROFILE
Robert Smith
Guest
FROM Robert Smith
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
Commencement Speakers This seems to be the year of the commencement speaker controversy. Student and faculty protests have caused Condoleezza Rice and the director of the International Monetary Fund to back out of commencement speeches at Rutgers and Smith College. And last Sunday, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black spoke to the Pasadena City College class of 2014, but only after they’d re-invited him after disinviting him because of intimate photographs they’d found of him online. Is all this attention to the speaker missing the point of college graduation altogether?
Recommended
Bookworm
Morgan Parker: There Are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé Morgan Parker says that the poems in her book There Are Things More Beautiful than Beyoncé take a stand against the clichés of the dominant culture.
The Business
In 'Speechless,' Scott Silveri combines comedy, family & disability Scott Silveri has written and produced sitcoms for more than 20 years. In all that time, he never encountered a TV family that looked anything like the one he grew up in -- with a mom, a dad...and a brother with cerebral palsy. He changed that with his show Speechless on ABC. Silveri tells us about looking to his own past for stories, and why he was determined to make a family comedy and not just a "disability show."