College campuses are no longer places where kids from all walks of life can count on having their worldview challenged and learn to put together cogent, logical arguments defending their view in a fair and balanced setting.
Instead, the majority of universities across America have become liberal echo chambers used to finish turning young people into loyal government subjects, having beaten their brains to mush with progressive indoctrination since the early days of grade school.
Well, a group of students attending Brown University have had about enough of the shenanigans and are fighting back, putting pressure on their school to invite more conservative speakers.
Campus Reform is reporting:
Students at Brown University recently launched a new coalition dedicated to increasing the spectrum of viewpoints expressed by speakers invited to campus.
SPEAK: Brown’s Coalition for Ideologically Diverse Students was quietly founded in Fall 2017 by sophomore Greer Brigham, a registered Democrat who cites the 2016 election as the trigger moment for his interest in promoting ideological diversity.
“The results of the 2016 election took me entirely by surprise,” Brigham told Campus Reform, adding that the “conversation we were having on campus [after the election] felt very separate from the one that was going on nationally.”
Unlike some other efforts to promote viewpoint diversity, SPEAK does not plan to directly invite conservatives or libertarians to lecture on campus. Instead, the coalition—which now includes roughly 20 students—aims to pressure the administration into doing the heavy lifting for them.
“Early on we decided that rather than try to invite a couple speakers ourselves, we would press the University to change the ideological makeup of the couple hundred speakers that they invite every semester,” Brigham told Campus Reform (emphasis his).
To do this, SPEAK researched the political affiliations of all 237 speakers the Brown University administration brought to campus in 2017, of which 95.4 percent were identified as having a “left-lean,” according to SPEAK’s inaugural March 21 report.
More specifically, of the 198 speakers who came to speak on American political topics in particular—times during which a speakers’ political affiliation might be more salient to students—93.4 percent leaned to the left.
The students who drafted that report also outlined a number of recommendations to administrators, urging them to “initiate a shift in the ideological diversity of the usually invited speakers” and “earmark funding for ideologically diverse speakers.”
Though the administration has yet to respond, Brigham and his team remain optimistic, saying they will “continue to pressure the administration for change.”
The First Amendment guarantees that every single citizen of this great nation has the right to express their thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, regardless of whether or not the majority in the country supports that belief system.
A good percentage of the educational institutions in our country are funded in some way by the government, therefore, when these schools silence conservatives, that’s interference by the federal government and a violation of the First Amendment.
These institutions need to make sure that the law of the land is upheld and all people have a platform for expression, including conservatives.
SPEAK is doing the right thing in applying pressure to school administrators to be more inclusive of the conservative point of view. Hopefully this will spread to other campuses around the nation.
