I quite enjoyed reading Tim Schmidt’s commentary in the Jan. 31 issue, entitled “Must our liberal arts college only offer liberal convo speakers?” Nowadays, universities bend over backwards, trying to build diverse student bodies, even to the point of resorting to “affirmative action” (the politically correct euphemism for “quotas”). Too bad they don’t show the same enthusiasm for diversity when it comes to other areas, such as the one Mr. Schmidt pointed out.
One can’t help but wonder, “Why the double standard? Why the hypocrisy?”
The following week’s Lawrentian (Feb. 7) included an article about Joe McCarthy, which apparently was meant to coincide with the 53rd anniversary of his famous Wheeling, West Virginia speech (generally viewed as the start of the so-called “Red Scare”).
These two articles got me to thinking: the national headquarters of the John Birch Society is just a few miles from the LU campus, so why not give them a call and invite them to send over a speaker to talk about the conservative perspective on any topic of interest?
I doubt that they would rate a convocation speech in the chapel, but there might actually be enough open-minded people on campus to fill an auditorium in the science building.
When I was in high school, LU had a series of speakers from all over the political spectrum give presentations.
One week, there was a Marxist professor from UC-Berkeley; the next week, there was a spokesman from the John Birch Society (at a time when their headquarters was in Massachusetts), etc. The presentations were in the Riverview Lounge, with a Q&A sessions afterwards. It would be interesting to see something like that again.
Brian Farmer
LU Alumnus