Ohio State's drug-fueled Bitcoin shame starts at the top
A member of the Commencement Speaker Advisory Committee breaks ranks to set the record straight on Ohio State's national embarrassment.
Chris Pan, a self-described “social entrepreneur,” recently gave what The Rooster described as the worst Ohio State commencement speech of all time.
You can read the special report from the industrious Max Littman over here; it’s already one of the most popular articles in the site’s history.
However, we flubbed a detail in the report about how Pan, who pitched Bitcoin and the power of singing over antidepressants to a bewildered crowd, came to speak at commencement when he arguably meets none of the criteria as listed by the Ohio State Speaker Advisory Committee:
A good public speaker
In a position to deliver a meaningful message with relevance for our graduating students
A leader in their field or linked to important and compelling issues
Name recognition (especially for May Commencement)
Core values consistent with those of Ohio State’s mission, vision, and values
By policy, members of the Advisory Committee cannot speak to the media about its work.
However, Pan’s performance was so embarrassing that a member of the committee spoke to The Rooster to set the record straight. The committee member was granted anonymity out of fear of retribution from the university.
The committee did not recommend Pan. His name was nowhere to be seen in the list of 79 names originally considered by the committee after the recommendation period. After soliciting recommendations.
That list included names like former Buckeye football coach Jim Tressel, Vice President Kamala Harris, ice cream tyrant Jeni Britton Bauer, MacArthur Fellow Hanif Abdurraqib, NBA All-Star LeBron James, Ukranian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Columbus-born restauranteur Guy Fieri.
The committee member stressed the work that went into whittling the list down.
“We watch YouTube videos of other speeches they’ve done and have hours-long discussions about them,” the member said. “We’ve cut people we think are too divisive (Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Cornel West) and kept some that are questionable (Dave Chapelle).
“Kirk Herbstreit is apparently on the list every year even though the majority of the faculty on the committee say they’ve never heard of him, and the committee chair can’t pronounce his last name.”
The committee then cuts that list to 10 names.
You can argue some of those names are better than others however you like. But none of them would have embarrassed Ohio State like Pan.
So, how did the options go from former presidents and famous actors to somebody nobody had heard of? Well, university alumni embarrassed by Sunday’s commencement ceremony can thank one man: Ohio State President Ted “Slapshot” Carter.
The Commencement Speaker Advisory Committee is truly advisory in nature. Just because the university taps a committee and spends hours vetting candidates, all that work can be thrown in the trash by the university president.
That’s what happened with President Carter, who, for some reason only known to himself and God, elected to go with an obscure Bitcoin freak over a final list of 10 individuals curated by his underlings.
It must be said that Carter is hardly the first president in Ohio State history to eschew the advisory committee and select their own speaker to various results. But as Matt Brown of Extra Points tweeted yesterday, it’s no state secret that Carter wasn’t the university’s first choice in last year’s hiring process.
Carter, with no previous connection to the university and only on the job for less than a year, felt confident that he knew better than student and faculty advisors. Curiously, he selected Pan, who, again, had never been nominated or considered by the advisory committee in any capacity.
That jives with what The Rooster reported on Monday in that Pan thought he was being pranked when his alma mater initially emailed him with the news it wanted him to speak at spring commencement.
Ohio State did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. If that changes, this space will be updated accordingly as we await the results of our public record request which The Rooster filed Monday morning.
NBC4, WOSU, and The Columbus Dispatch — the only local outlets who covered the debacle — did so from the angle of Pan writing his speech while high on the South American psychoactive brew known as Ayahuasca.
None pressed Ohio State on how a guy like that was deemed worthy of delivering the biggest commencement speech on the university’s annual calendar.
While it’s indeed comical that the crowd booed Pan at the mere mention of Bitcoin, it’s less funny when you consider that Carter, who personally tapped Pan as speaker, sits on the Board of Directors for Terawulf, a Bitcoin mining company and is invested in the cryptocurrency himself.
Carter has a vested interest in propagating Bitcoin, which, again, is the fake internet currency preferred by drug dealers, money launderers, pedophiles, and a host of other cybercriminals. Using the university’s bully pulpit to deliver that message is nasty work, even if the crowd was filled with people sensible enough to boo the idea of investing their retirement fund into unbacked securities.
The message, with the university’s seal emblazoned in the background, traveled well within the Bitcoin community. This single tweet, which calls Pan a “fucking legend” while doubling the crowd size without mentioning it booed his ass, has nearly half a million views on Twitter alone:
Carter owes the Ohio State community an explanation of his thought process, considering this speech has garnered national attention—The New York Post published an article late last night—as the most tragic event at a ceremony in which a troubled parent died by suicide by leaping from the top of Ohio Stadium.
Carter made clear that he was the pliable type of bureaucrat when he kissed the ring of billionaire pervert Les Wexner shortly after his hiring. Just last week, he deputized the Ohio State Highway Patrol to leverage the state’s monopoly on violence against peaceful protestors on the South Oval.
Maybe those students would have found a more receptive audience in Carter if they had the sense to ask the university to divest from the slaughter in Gaza and put that money into Bitcoin!
Carter won’t say anything about his selection of Pan because local media outlets won’t push the issue. We’ll see what the records request provides us, but until then, we can almost admire Carter’s arrogance while laughing at the fact it blew up in his face in such a comedic way—even if it cost us the dignity of our beloved agricultural school.