When Chancellor Mark Wrighton announced that Tony La Russa, former MLB manager of the Chicago White Sox, Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, will be the speaker at this year’s commencement, no one was really complaining; however, no one was really excited, either.

La Russa is a solid choice, but we urge Washington University to strive to find a speaker with a wider appeal to the student body. Not everybody at Wash. U. is a sports fan.

We do applaud Wash. U. for its recent efforts to diversify the occupations of the commencement speakers. In the past five years, we’ve boasted speakers with a wide range of expertise: in reverse order, La Russa (sports), Cory Booker (politics), Mike Peters (art), Elie Wiesel (humanitarianism) and Steven Chu (science). This is a great improvement from the period in the mid-2000s when four straight commencement speakers were politicians. Despite this variety, we wish that Wash. U. would commit to more gender diversity.

The diversity of speakers should accurately reflect the diversity of the student body in more than just one area of interest. In the past 11 years, we’ve had only one woman speaker at commencement—Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America. On a national level at peer institutions, female graduation speakers are outnumbered—sometimes vastly—by their male counterparts, but there’s a far cry between reflecting national trends and only securing one female speaker in more than a decade.

We know that female speakers have been considered in recent years but not confirmed, to a variety of reasons, and we encourage the University to continue soliciting female speakers and, soon, actually confirming them.

Furthermore, in choosing a speaker, Wash. U. needs to put more consideration into the values of the institution against those of its potential speaker. La Russa has voiced support for the Tea Party and openly spoke out in support of Arizona’s 2010 legislation that called for unreasonably tough enforcement of illegal immigration laws, parts of which were later ruled unconstitutional.

“I’m actually a supporter of what Arizona is doing,” La Russa said in 2010. “If the national government doesn’t fix your problem, you’ve got a problem. You’ve got to fix it yourself. That’s just part of the American way.”

While La Russa voicing support for radical legislation will likely not affect the message of his commencement speech, which will more likely focus on his baseball career, the University needs to be more careful about the names and beliefs it is associating with our institution. By inviting La Russa to speak and receive an honorary Wash. U. degree, we are, in a sense, condoning his actions.

In 2008, Washington University caught flack for awarding an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, a staunch opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, modern feminism, same-sex marriage and immigration reform, a decision that reflected poorly on the values of our University.

While we certainly aren’t putting La Russa on the same level as Schlafly, Wash. U. needs to make sure that the values of the recipients of the honorary degrees we award are ones that we as an institution can stand behind.