Chicago Tech Academy student Tyvion Campbell, 18, performed a split as she walked across the state to get her diploma during her graduation ceremony last month the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Chicago. The exuberant display got cheers from the crowd, but the young woman, a gymnast, was refused her diploma as a result, and subsequently reprimanded by school officials.
“The principal [Zataya Shackelford] told me that ‘I need to think of a way to make up for what I’ve done. This was supposed to be a celebratory moment and I made it about myself,’” Campbell told reporters. She was escorted out of the ceremony and still hasn’t received her diploma. “It was disappointing,” Tylon added. “It really hurt my feelings. I cried and I couldn’t even continue the graduation.” Apparently the school has no specific policy prohibiting celebratory gymnastics.
I’m amazed that any school would do this. All of the graduations I participated in were handled with restraint and decorum by the graduates (think of the ceremony in “An Officer and a Gentleman”) and any student performing even mild “Hooray for me!” gestures would have looked like a buffoon. However, students parading across the stage like they had just won an Olympic gold or a “Best in Show” ribbon has been standard graduation practice for decades now. In fact, the amount of grandstanding seen in high school ceremonies has increased in inverse proportion to how much a diploma means. The excessively proud high school grad with the screaming family in the audience probably can’t read. Tylon graduated with a 3.5 GPA and plans to study Business Administration at Georgia State University, we are told by the news media, meaning that she at least thought she had something to split about. Sadly, everybody on the stage probably had that high a grade point average or higher.
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:
Was it fair for the school principal to punish the student for her split?
Now, other cases where students were punished for crossing metaphorical lines during their graduation ceremonies are easy calls. For example, Leen Hijaz, a senior at North Carolina’s Clayton High School, had her mic cut off during her commencement speech when she stated to rant against I.C.E. Good! She had no right to hijack the proceedings. In my fantasy world, her diploma would have been revoked and and she would be sent back to the fifth grade to learn about the rule of law and civics.
Ethics Alarms 
This is a tough one. Making it about the ceremony itself and not whether or not she or her fellow graduates did or did not deserve a high school diploma, I would say the school has an obligation to enforce standards at high attendance events.
She did the splits. Next time, someone else does cartwheels. Someone else blares out “We are the Champions” by Queen from a hidden cell phone. Before you know it, the endless ceremonies become performance art demonstrations. At some point, slowing down the ceremony and taking attention away from other graduates has to be discouraged.
I don’t understand why any of that would be bad? What’s the point of the ceremony if not to celebrate the students? I get that there are a lot of them, so they can’t all have 5 minutes to dance and preen, but doing something that doesn’t slow down the production doesn’t seem beyond the pale.
On what she did… The news had to play it five times because it took less than five seconds from start to finish. You could literally sneeze and have missed it. Was it tasteless? Sure. Was it disruptive? No. The witholding of the diploma probably slowed the production down more than the split.
I’m not sure what exactly happened here though… I think this might be an Americanism… She still graduated, right? If this is actually going to hold up post-secondary enrollment, I think the school is so far out over their skis that I’d sue. If the diploma is just a piece of paper, I’m less outraged, but still annoyed.