Bush was invited to speak at the Ohio State commencement by representatives of the graduating class. But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling could be subject to expulsion and arrest.
from a more recent(1 hour 20 minutes more recent)AP report - June 14, 2002 at 11:15:17 PDT
....To Ohio State graduates who obeyed an announcer's warning against heckling and greeted Bush with hearty cheers, ...
....there is no longer the reference to arrest or expulsion.
http://www.cleveland.com/ohio/plaindealer/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/1024142276118590.xml
Ohio News
Bush urges OSU grads to volunteer Bush calls on grads to serve others
06/15/02
Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus- Hoping for a "gathering momentum of millions of acts of kindness and decency," President Bush yesterday called on more than 6,200 Ohio State University graduates to become volunteers.
"Service is not a chain or a chore," Bush said during a commencement speech to about 60,000 graduates and guests at Ohio Stadium. "It gives direction to your gifts and purpose to your freedom."
Garbed in a black robe embellished in blue velvet, Bush told graduates it would be up to them to decide whether the spirit that has grown since Sept. 11 will be, as some suggest, "shallow and temporary."
"Your generation will respond to these skeptics - one way or another," he said. "You will determine whether our new ethic of responsibility is the break of a wave, or the rise of a tide."
Volunteerism among college students is increasingly popular, said Dan Stenta, associate director of the university's Ohio Union, and some colleges now send a "service transcript" in addition to an academic transcript along with graduates.
He said Ohio State is planning such a program.
Stenta said surveys have shown that 40 percent of Ohio State students volunteer at least one hour a week, and 85 percent of fraternity and sorority members at the university have participated in at least one community service event.
Graduate Alison Pokorny, 21, of Parma Heights, said she worked 900 hours while attending Ohio State for AmeriCorps - one of the volunteer opportunities cited by Bush in his speech. A medical dietetics major, Pokorny said she visited after-school programs and taught nutrition facts to 6- to 12-year-olds. Her work was supervised by the Children's Hunger Alliance.
"It's really special to see the impact that you can have on a little kid's life," she said. "I just did it because it's something I really, really wanted to do."
To help boost such volunteerism nationwide, Bush announced during his speech a new Internet listing of community volunteer opportunities around the nation.
The listing is on the USA Freedom Corps Web site: www.usafreedomcorps.gov.
Bush is the first sitting president to speak at an Ohio State commencement since Gerald Ford addressed graduates in 1974.
Bush's father spoke to graduating Buckeyes in 1983, when he was Ronald Reagan's vice president.
The younger Bush's appearance at Ohio State, the nation's second-largest university campus, was his sixth visit to Ohio since he was elected.
Security at the event was so tight that guests were asked to begin arriving at 6 a.m., 3½ hours before ceremonies began. Lines of expectant guests extended from the east side of the horseshoe stadium almost to the east bank of the Olentangy River.
Outside the stadium, protesters rallied over a variety of Bush's foreign and domestic policies.
"Aside from the fact that we think that George Bush wasn't legitimately elected," said Nick Solsman, one protest organizer, "we also believe that he's more beholden to the corporations that financed his campaign - with Enron as the largest contributor - than the American public." Bush was one of five people to receive honorary doctoral degrees at the event.
New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner also appeared at the commencement ceremony, to receive an honorary doctorate of business administration. Steinbrenner, a Rocky River native, earned his fortune at the Cleveland-based American Shipbuilding Co. He and his wife, Ohio State alum Joan Zieg Steinbrenner, recently underwrote a new marching band practice center at Ohio Stadium.
Bush, one-time managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, quipped: "I guess we're both being honored as legends of baseball. Legends, at least, in our own minds."