FRONTENAC, Missouri – Conservatives can share hours of examples of liberal college shenanigans, but they must fight for their ideas if they want to see change on campus, a Christian university president told a conservative educational policy conference this weekend.
Dr. Everett Piper drew national acclaim after writing a blog post in a response to an Oklahoma Wesleyan University student who was offended by a sermon. Titled “This is not a day care. It’s a university,” the post denounced the “safe place” culture on college campuses.
“You know, I could go on and on with this snowflake rebellion – this nonsense – this call for trigger warnings and safe spaces and an acknowledgment of microaggressions,” Piper said after opening his speech with a few examples.
In a separate speech before the Constitutional Coalition’s conference, Amy Lutz of Young America’s Foundation said she could go on for two or three hours about the crazy things she’s seen on campus.
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With a conference theme of “Defeating the Progressives, Restoring Liberty and Freedom,” Piper and Lutz also stressed in their speeches the ability of conservatives to fight back against the liberal assault on campuses nationwide.
Headliners included Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a 2012 presidential candidate.
‘Stop this. This is nonsense.’
For Piper, fighting back is something he knows about firsthand.
“Well, I started a bit of a grassfire,” he joked during his remarks on Friday. “It’s because you all and your neighbors were asking for somebody to step forward with courage and spine and call a spade a spade and say ‘Stop this. This is nonsense.’”
Piper told the crowd that education is in crisis; that universities are now bastions of speech codes rather than the bulwark of free speech; and that propaganda and power reign where there used to be a pursuit of truth.
“Our track record is terrible,” he said. “Decade after decade we’ve taught our next generation that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you, that morality is relative and that good and evil are merely subjective social constructs.”
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However, conservatives can push back against the current state of affairs by having confidence in their own ideas, Piper said, while also stressing the importance of the liberal arts.
“Your passion should be the ideas that your kids and your culture will embrace,” he said.
And most of all, Piper told attendees they should “have the courage to speak the truth … it wins.”
The power of one student
“College students, administrators and professors worship at the altar of progressivism and the altar of social justice,” Lutz of the Young America’s Foundation told attendees in her speech on Saturday.
She relayed the story of how a female student at her alma mater, a Catholic university, told her “God’s not real.” The female student was part of a group that accosted Lutz following a talk by Allen West at Saint Louis University, and her remark came after Lutz told the group she would pray for them.
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Titled “Facing the Firestorm on Campus,” Lutz’s speech highlighted one successful fight.
She told the story of Mark Kahanding, a student at California State University-Los Angeles, and his efforts to bring conservative Ben Shapiro to speak at the liberal campus.
The event garnered a massive protest, with hundreds blocking the entrance into the theater where Shapiro gave his speech, but Lutz said it also sparked a movement by inspiring other conservative students at the university to come forward.
“Now, it was a crazy day on that campus, but what happened was conservative students on that campus realized that there was other conservatives, that there were other ideas, and Mark’s club went from one person to today, over 120 people in that club,” Lutz said. “That is why it’s so important for even one student to push back.”
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