College Pressured for Left-Leaning Speaker Bias
If you feel as though all news from America’s college campuses is bad news, think again! A new coalition of students is forming at Brown University in Rhode Island. They are calling on the university to “earmark funding for ideologically diverse speakers” to counter what they have calculated is an overwhelming left-leaning bias.
This group calls themselves “SPEAK: Brown’s Coalition for Ideologically Diverse Students.” The group was founded last fall by a sophomore named Greer Brigham. You might be shocked to hear that Brigham is a registered Democrat! He cites the 2016 election as his trigger for starting this group. “The results of the 2016 election took me entirely by surprise,” he said. “The conversation we were having on campus [after the election] felt very separate from the one that was going on nationally.”
How shockingly refreshing! To see even a young Democrat who recognizes the severe disadvantages to the liberal tactic of shutting out one side of the conversation. The SPEAK coalition is now comprised of some 20 students, and on March 21 they released a detailed report on the drastic “left-lean” bias of Brown’s speaking events.
They researched the political affiliations of all 237 speakers the University administration brought to campus in 2017, and found 95.4% of them to have a left-leaning bias. More specifically, of the 198 speakers who came to speak specifically on American political topics, over 93% leaned left!
The SPEAK coalition has decided not to simply invite their own speakers, but to publicly pressure the University to change their practices. Brigham described: “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.”
Although the administration has yet to respond to this bipartisan student group, SPEAK insists they will “continue to pressure” the administration for a “shift in the ideological diversity of…invited speakers.”
This is wonderful news! Brown University’s SPEAK coalition could spark not just hope for conservative students, but for a movement for the return of fair and civil political discourse to institutions of higher learning across America.
