U. Senate votes to end graduation prayer

There will be no more prayer at the campus-wide commencement ceremony after the University Senate voted to eliminate the practice yesterday.

The senate approved a proposal that eliminates a prayer invocation at the university's annual commencement ceremony in a 32-14 vote after a lengthy debate that touched on the controversial issue of the separation of church and state.

"The real concern this issue raises is the separation of church and state," Jewish history professor Marsha Rozenblit said. "And that is one of the most important features of our democracy."

Until now, a ritual invocation - which is crafted and presented on a rotating basis by each of the university's 14 chaplains, who are instructed to make it as "inclusive as possible" - would open the all-campus graduation ceremony. But critics of the prayer have argued that regardless of intent, the invocation is not all-inclusive and has no place in a non-religious ceremony at a public institution.

Rev. Peter Antoci, the university's Episcopalian chaplain, spoke out at the beginning of the meeting in favor of keeping the invocation.

"We need to be careful not to send the message that secular language is seen as superior and acceptable while religious language is seen as inferior and unacceptable," he said. "[The university's chaplains] are a living example of how the university has embraced religious expression and tolerance."

While Antoci voiced opposition and concern over the elimination of prayer altogether, the university's chaplains have supported other alternatives that have been raised to the senate in the past.

Last year, a similar proposal would have substituted the two-minute prayer with a one-minute nondenominational invocation, jointly written by the university's chaplains, followed by a minute of silence. But the senate's executive committee decided the proposal was not well-researched enough to be brought to a vote.

Critics said a nondenominational invocation and a moment of silence was not a solution, as it still did not include "non-believers" in the ceremony.

"Prayer, even when it's generic and utterly nondenominational, feels Christian to non-Christians in this country," Rozenblit said. "Getting rid of it entirely puts religion where it belongs: in the hearts and minds of religious people - not in a public ceremony at a public university."

When the senate considered the issue last year, university President Dan Mote said "it can be cloudy about what is denominational and what is not," but that there were "ways to convey the spirit of the moment without crossing the line."

While Mote could ignore the senate and decide to keep the prayer, he rarely ignores the university's most powerful legislative body, which directly advises him on policy. Individual colleges' graduation ceremonies are not impacted by the decision.

Office of Information Technology Policy and Planning Director Willie Brown, who chairs the committee that drafted the recommendation, noted that while students have the choice to attend or not attend the commencement ceremony, none of the university's peer institutions - University of California, Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina and UCLA - have prayer at their campus-wide graduations.

"We drafted this proposal in an effort to be more sensitive to both believers and non-believers," Brown said. "This topic is as old as time; there are no perfect solutions."

Student senators banded together to voice a joint support of the prayer-ban. All of them voted in favor of removing the prayer.

"This is primarily a student issue," undergraduate student senator and junior government and politics major David Zuckerman said to the senate. "[Student senators] feel unanimously that the senate should approve this proposal."

But many members of the faculty disagreed with the idea that having prayer at commencement primarily affects students, saying the university's reputation and image were at stake, particularly in light of recent events.

"I can only imagine the headline in the paper tomorrow: University bans prayer at commencement, shows porn that evening," engineering professor and university senator Arthur Johnson said. "The implication of this policy is that the university is anti-religion. That's the wrong signal to send."

"If we strike down prayer from commencement proceedings we are sending the wrong message," Antoci added. "[We're sending the message that] religious language is judged offensive, while porno language is judged acceptable."

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