What's Nanny's Angle?

Nanny Bloomberg, who doesn't think you should be allowed to buy a Big Gulp, had these seemingly conservative comments to say at Harvard's graduation:

He added, "If you want the freedom to worship as you wish, to speak as you wish, and to marry whom you wish, you must tolerate my freedom to do so -- or not do so -- too. What I do may offend you. You may find my actions immoral or unjust. But attempting to restrict my freedoms in ways that you would not restrict your own leads only to injustice."

Bloomberg compared the intolerance of ideas prevalent in the country today to "McCarthy's Red Scare" in the 1950s and its destruction of thousands of lives. In the 2012 presidential race, he said, the overwhelming majority of campaign contributions from Ivy League faculty went to Barack Obama.

"Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species," he said.

After the speech, Sarah Surrain, who completed her master's degree in education, said Bloomberg was bold to criticize universities as too liberal.

"I thought it was really thoughtful," she said of the speech. "It was nice that it wasn't just platitudes."

Harvard Law School graduate Jared Nicholson said the speech was "a great message ... about tolerance of different ideas and diversity of opinions."

Greg Silverberg, an engineering school graduate, said he welcomed the former mayor's viewpoint.

I hope there were some platitudes in there, that it had something more than that for the students to digest.