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read Father Daniel Berrigan on the award
Boston—Activists from the Stop
the Wars Coalition will join students, staff and faculty
from Boston College and other universities to protest the
choice of Condoleezza Rice as commencement speaker for this
year's graduation ceremony at Boston College.
The rally will start at 9 a.m.
on Monday (Cleveland Circle, march to Visitors Entrance),
the day of the graduation ceremony, and continue till noon.
Ms. Kaveri Rajaraman, a graduate student at Harvard, said
"Innumerable deaths are a direct consequence of the Bush
Administration and Condoleezza Rice’s policies in the Middle
East and beyond. It is simply unconscionable that Boston
College would honor her in this city."
“Without realizing it, Boston
College has helped reignite the voice of dissent on
America’s campuses,” adds Ms. Kim Foltz of Massachusetts
Global Action.
Father Daniel Berrigan—Vietnam
antiwar activist—condemns the award as “anti-Catholic,”
noting that Ms. Rice’s work “…includes planning, executing,
publicly defending a war condemned by the Pope; a war whose
chief victims are Iraqi children, women, the ill and the
aged.”
“Ms. Rice,” he concludes,
“richly deserves a Dishonorable Degree.”
The rally will feature music,
speeches and anti-war visuals. Major theologians and
regional activists are expected to be at the rally as are
major religious figures.
The decision to award an
honorary degree in Law to Rice and invite her to address the
graduating students has already led to a storm of protest. A
student petition demanding that her invitation be rescinded
gathered hundreds of signatures as did a faculty letter of
opposition. Steve Almond, an adjunct professor of English
resigned his post to protest the invitation. | 
