A couple of weeks ago, we criticized the University of Wisconsin for struggling to get any big name commencement speakers over the last decades, while other Big Ten schools landed people like Bill Clinton, Dan Rather, John McCain and Barack Obama.

Well, for the first time in recent memory, UW will have a speaker who at least somewhat belongs in that list: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Duncan, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools and was a close friend and confidant of the president prior to his appointment, has an enormous amount of influence on higher education in this country. This is clearly one of the main domestic concerns of many Americans, as apparent from the March 4 protests of rising tuition at colleges nationwide, including UW-Milwaukee.

We mentioned in our previous comments on this matter that to get a big name, UW would have to offer an honorarium funded by segregated fees and move the speech to Camp Randall, since the most important people don’t have the time to give six different speeches.

Well, we were wrong on the former in this case — getting Duncan is an accomplishment. We still think seg fees should be raised one dollar, or two, to go toward an honorarium so UW can be ensured a big name consistently. Sure, Duncan is no Bill Clinton, but at least he’s relevant — so we say bravo to UW the senior class officers for that.

But we’ve still got a bit of a qualm.

See, Duncan’s a busy man — that whole tuition going up by 4,000 percent at California schools thing is pretty messed up, and even though Wisconsin is out of the running for “Race to the Top” money, Duncan still has to figure out how to dole out $4.35 billion in K-12 funding to about a dozen different states.

So that means he can only speak at one ceremony. That one ceremony will take place Saturday, May 15 at 10 a.m. at the Kohl Center and will feature graduates from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the School of Education, the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the School of Human Ecology, the School of Medicine and Public Health, the School of Nursing and the School of Pharmacy.

As has been the case each year, College of Engineering and School of Business students will have their ceremony later on Saturday and Letters and Science students — who make up the majority of the seniors — will graduate on Sunday, May 16.

How do these students, whose only crime was to graduate from one of the bigger colleges, get to end their college careers? By listening to a guy named James Kass, a 1991 alumnus of UW who founded a San Francisco-based nonprofit called Youth Speaks, which aims to improve literacy rates among children.

By insisting on so many different ceremonies, UW is keeping more than half of its graduating class from listening to the big name the senior officers worked so hard to get.

It’s nice that UW wants to read the names of every graduate — your name matters so little when you’re lost in a sea of 42,000 people for four years, so it must be nice to have your 28 seconds of fame.

But UW should mimic the University of Illinois, who has one giant ceremony, then smaller ceremonies where names are read for each individual school. We ask that UW move Duncan’s speech to Camp Randall, invite anybody who wants to come, then have smaller ceremonies throughout the weekend.

If this becomes the standard, maybe visits from people like Duncan will become the norm, and graduates won’t have to end their college careers by having some guy they have never heard of rhetorically ask them:

“Why not?”