For its commencement speaker this spring, Goucher College has snagged Matthew Modine, an accomplished actor, director and screenwriter who's made some admirable personal choices. (He doesn't own a television or a car, according to the Internet Movie Database and ForbesAuto.com, respectively. And, in a fruitless attempt to save moviegoers from dorky Cold War cinema, he turned down the Tom Cruise role in Top Gun.)
But Modine is best known on the Goucher campus for this role: father of senior Bowman Modine.
Some students are upset that the elder Modine will be speaking on their big day, and not because his son is something of a campus eccentric. (Bowman rides a bike while wearing a top hat and bathrobe, over clothes.)
FOR THE RECORD
An item published in yesterday's 2b column misspelled the name of a Goucher College student whose father is actor Matthew Modine. The student's name is Boman Modine.
The Sun regrets the errors.
The choice struck some students as dated, since members of the Class of 2008 were born about the time the actor played his most memorable part, as Private Joker in the 1987 movie Full Metal Jacket. Some also felt Goucher was being cheap.
"[T]his is the kind of thing I'd expect from a state school," one student sniffed in the school paper.
Goucher doesn't pay its graduation speakers, except in honorary degrees, so the school relies on personal connections to line them up. That strategy has worked over the years to get some big, if offbeat, names, including Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, Simpsons voice-over artist Harry Shearer and Mr. Rogers.
"Nobel laureates and a woman who owns a gazillion-dollar empire" are not so easily snagged, said Goucher spokeswoman Kristen Keener, referring to two speakers who'd been on seniors' wish lists: Al Gore and Oprah.
Students have been sounding off on a Facebook page devoted to the topic, titled "Commencement Speaker 200 Hate." Among the comments: "Anyone who is disappointed has obviously not seen Vision Quest."
Bowman Modine wrote on the site that he couldn't "believe the level of vehemence that I've witnessed here." Contacted through Facebook, he declined to comment further.
Another student suggested that griping Goucherites needed to get a life, even as she kept tabs on the flap from an overseas study program.
"Man, I can't believe I'm missing out on so much fun!" she wrote on Facebook. "stupid Italy."
It's the icing on the marketing
The nation's second-oldest Catholic university celebrated its 200th birthday with -- how else? -- a 3-foot tower of yellow pound cake, chocolate filling and fondant, made to look like the school's historic cupola.
