The College Fix

University representative’s outburst was ’embarrassing for all in the vicinity’

The University of Minnesota was so determined to prevent an attempted shutdown of Ben Shapiro’s planned talk at the school that it intentionally limited the conservative pundit’s audience, as revealed last month in internal emails.

The Young America’s Foundation, which sponsored the Feb. 27 talk and is suing the school for the “unbridled discretion” it wields over student events, is eager to showcase (unnamed) alumni who have stopped donating to the taxpayer-funded university in protest of its treatment of Shapiro.

It got another one this month: a scholarship founder who attended the event.

The redacted July 12 letter to UMinn President Eric Kaler, who is resigning in a year, says the donor established a “Scholarship Endowment Fund” with the university after his daughter’s death. It has granted more than $60,000 and “was to receive a major bequest under my estate plan.”

He graduated from its Carlson School of Management in 1975 and was a member of UMinn’s Medical Foundation President’s Club in the 1980s and 1990s, the letter says.

This “patriotic and conservative alumnus” has watched with growing alarm the “political atmosphere” of the university.

MORE: Emails show admins intentionally limited Shapiro audience

The remote and small venue granted to the Shapiro event, and the happenings he witnessed at the event that night, pushed this donor over the edge:

In my opinion, the University demonstrated a strong bias against a conservative message being presented to students on campus.

Also, the night of the lecture I was a witness to a very unprofessional confrontation of a young YAF spokesman by a representative of the University. This YAF spokesman is a Minnesota native and was there with his mother. The University representative confronted the YAF spokesman while he was speaking with his mother and accused him of being a “pathological liar” repeatedly. It was embarrassing for all in the vicinity of the confrontation. As a University Alumnus it was a further illustration of the bias I felt the University had demonstrated for a long time.

That spokesman was YAF’s Spencer Brown, according to a YAF statement on the letter.

There’s no reason for the university to give the cold shoulder to a speaker like Shapiro, who is “brilliant and thoughtful,” the donor says. UMinn should adopt a “free speech policy with equal access for all political viewpoints”:

The faculty has ample opportunity to advance alternative points of view. The University demeans its mission when it mistreats or ignores conservative scholarship and conservative students.

The university can wave goodbye to further donations from the unnamed alumnus, now or upon his death. It will now go to YAF, he said.

MORE: Students sue UMinn for broad policy that exiled Shapiro

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