Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly offers his pithy opinion about a recent Los Angeles Times article on the lack of conservative commencement speakers.

GRADUATION time is upon us again, and a study by the Los Angeles Times says plenty about the state of higher education. The paper looked at the invited commencement speakers for 150 colleges and universities. There are four conservative speakers, and at least 69 liberal speakers.

In fact, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, a very liberal guy, has as many campus addresses as all elected Republicans combined.

There is no shortage of intellect or accomplishment on the right. The reason few conservative speakers are invited is that college administrators are frightened by radical-left students and faculty members.

Karl Rove’s speech at the University of Massachusetts was disrupted, and so was the address by Sen. Rand Paul at Howard University. Nobody wants a graduation ceremony turned into an ideological circus, and that’s what often happens when conservatives are invited to speak.

Last year, I headed up a benefit for the It Happened to Alexa Foundation at Boston University, where I received a master’s degree in broadcast journalism. As a freshman, Alexa Branchini was raped in a BU dorm and had to withdraw from the school. She eventually founded, with her parents, an organization to help victims of violent crime. I felt the campus would be the perfect place to hold a fundraiser. How wrong I was.

A number of far-left professors and administrators, including a university vice president, boycotted the event. The school did little to promote it and essentially folded under the pressure of zealots. It was an absolute disgrace and an insult to Alexa and her family. That tells you all you need to know about the mentality of fanatical college professors and the cowardly administrators who enable them.

…It is long past time to call out colleges, especially those publicly funded, and demand that they be fair in hiring practices and speaking forums. I give a nice annual donation to Marist College, where I obtained a degree in history, because it is fair. But I’ve stopped giving to BU and Harvard (where I received a master’s in public administration), because those schools are not fair. All college grads should evaluate their contributions.

That’s the only way the liberal higher-education stranglehold will be broken. Many of those pinhead professors espouse socialistic tenets — but, believe me, they want the money. The goal of higher education should be to champion the airing of all honest viewpoints. Nothing less is acceptable.