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Student Panel #1: Faculty and Administration Harassment of Students

Washington, D.C.  March 4, 2007

David Horowitz; David Horowitz Freedom Center;

Michael Abdurakhmanov; Pace University; Student

Matt Ferrara; Florida State University;

Logan Fisher; Temple University; Former Student

Matt Sanchez; Columbia University; Student

Jason Walter; Bloomsburg University; Student

Ruth Malhotra; Georgia Tech; Student

Bradley Alexander; University of Georgia; Student

David Horowitz: Welcome to the Second Academic Freedom Conference.

The purpose of this conference is to highlight some of the problems that we’ve been talking about on university campuses.

I am hoping — we’re now in the third year of our campaign.  We’ve had a wall put up, by opponents of the Academic Bill of Rights and academic freedom, of denial that there is a problem.  That’s been the first line of defense of the status quo — refusal to recognize that there is a problem.  And the second offense has been to distort entirely the Academic Bill of Rights.

I often find my opponents putting words in my mouth and then attacking the words that they put in my mouth.  I think that’s a fairly common experience for conservatives.  But I believe that over time, because we have truth on our side here, in this respect, that we will prevail.  And I think this is — change is already happening and will continue happening.

We had two very significant breakthroughs in the state of Pennsylvania, where two universities, Temple and Penn State, adopted — in the case of Penn State, they applied their existing and very good academic freedom provisions to students for the first time.  And they did it through — the faculty senate actually did it through a formal resolution.  And at Temple University, the Board of Trustees adopted a student — it’s called Faculty and Student Rights and Responsibilities.  This is the first time in the history of Pennsylvania.

But I’m — you know, I can’t say this with certainty, because I haven’t studied all — I don’t know if it’s 3,000 or 6,000 university academic freedom provisions.  But I’m willing to bet that there’s not a single other university in the United States that has academic freedom provisions that apply to students.  And this is certainly true in the state of Pennsylvania, in the public universities in Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania, which are the schools I’m familiar with.

So this is a huge breakthrough.  It was successfully obscured by the American Federation of Teachers and its allies in the press.  And the Democrats on the Academic Freedom Committee also did this.  They gutted the report and eliminated the part of the report that had analyzed the existing academic freedom policies and showed, for example — at Penn State, the policy was in the employee handbook.  Students are not employees.  So when students have no grievance machinery, and they have no rights, they are not going to file complaints.

As it happens, at Penn State, 13 students did file complaints over five years.  And this was used quite cynically by the administration at Penn State, the Democrats on the committee, and the press in Pennsylvania to say that academic freedom violations of students were rare.  Well, it’s not the violations that were rare; it’s the reporting of them, because students are not protected.

During these hearings, we had about 20 or 30 students who signed statements but did not want their names released to the committee or the press.  And the reason that the Temple trustees actually decided to adopt a student-specific bill of rights is because they were presented with the fact — they talked to the students and heard the stories.

I think — and I will have more to say about this later today — but I think it’s in the interests of all parties concerned, including the — including, well, certainly the majority of professors, who are professional and who respect students’ rights and their — respect the differences that students may have with their own views — that large majority — it’s in their interest to do something about this problem.  And it’s even in the interest of the activists on faculties to do so.  Because this is only bringing a bad reputation to the — or bad repercussions to the university, which they, after all, dominate now.

So it’s bad for everybody concerned.  And that’s why I’m confident, if we are persistent, we will prevail.

So, this first panel is about Faculty and Administration Harassment of Students.  And our first speaker is going to be Michael Abdurakhmanov, who is a junior at Pace University, who had an experience recently when he tried to show the film, “Obsession.”

Michael Abdurakhmanov: Thank you very much, David.

I want to first take a moment and thank everybody for coming out today, and thank David Horowitz for putting together this great conference, helping all of us share our stories with all of you.

My situation began back in November.  I am President of my — of the local Pace Hillel at Pace University.  And as part of our Judaism Awareness Week, we wanted to put on the film, “Obsession.”  And it’s a film on radical Islam.  It talks about, very honestly, what’s going on in the Middle East; a lot of the facts that your general student doesn’t really know, because academia does not teach it.  It’s not a popular subject.

When we had this idea, I contacted the Muslim Student Association, the MSA, to work with us on this event.  Because we figured if — it’ll be great to have a moderate Muslim community do a joint event with us like this, to show to — at least to our school, if not New York and our country, that it is about time that these two nations that have been constantly battling each other to step forward and condone terrorism, and work together in a peaceful — to find a peaceful resolution.

MSA did not see eye to eye with us.  Instead of coming to us and saying no, they went directly to the administration and totally rejected our offer.  The administration postponed contacting us about — when they knew that, they wanted to pull the plug on the film.  I heard rumors that Dean O’Grady, the Dean of Students, wanted to cancel the showing.

So after making an appointment for myself and [Alice Gruenberg] — she’s the Vice President of Hillel at Pace — we sat in on the meeting, and it started off very friendly.  You know, how are you, and everything.  And finally, about seven minutes in, Dean O’Grady says to us, “You know, Mike, if you show this film, you would be further incriminating yourself in the recent hate crimes that occurred at our campus.”

Now, the hate crimes that occurred in our campus are pretty serious.  There were — the Koran was desecrated about three or four times.  But at the same time, there were swastikas found all over — in multiple campuses at Pace.  But for some reason, the administration felt it was — they had to lean more with the Muslim community and feel more sympathy for what’s going on in that situation.  And they completely stifled our freedom of speech to express — to show this film.

That following — well, that day, we told them, you know, “I don’t want the police investigating me any more than they should.  So we’re not going to show the film.  And we might show it maybe in a year or so when the situation calms down.”  That following Monday, we had a mediation between Hillel and MSA.  And six administrators were present.  And two professional mediators were there, to make sure that everything was smooth.

When MSA began talking, they were being very loud, very obnoxious.  And at the end, they were actually cursing whenever I made signs that I would like to show this film at a later date.  To add onto this, when I tried to defend Hillel’s point of view, the assistant, Dean David Clark, was sitting to the right of me.  And as I was defending the film, he put his hand on my right shoulder and pushed me back down into my seat.  And this happened twice.  So as you could imagine, I felt completely helpless, completely silenced.

I realized then that there was nothing that I can say to these people that will change their mind and open up their eyes to what this film is really trying to say, and that if we really work together, we could make this, you know, supposedly bad film work for the whole community at Pace.  They didn’t see eye to eye with us on that.

What really set us off was that in the weeks to come, students started coming forward saying, you know, this isn’t just when we’re talking about big, political films like this; it’s happening in the classrooms as well.  Students were stepping forward, saying that professors are talking — you know, they would walk into a classroom, say, “So, did you hear what the stupid President did today?”  Just — an ideology that they assume everybody else is on the same page with them.  And it’s not fair to those students that may disagree, or maybe want to express a different point of view.

Because as you could imagine, when the — just saying “professor” itself has a certain value to it, some kind of level of respect in it.  So when you have a person who’s a doctorate or professor speaking in front of you and says, you know, this-and-this is wrong, the war is wrong, Zionism should fall — as a student, you feel silenced.  You feel, you know — well, everybody else seems to be shaking their head yes.  I don’t really want to step up, because my grades may suffer, or I might be ridiculed with my classmates.

And this is something that, after speaking to these panelists and speaking with all of you, you know, last night, I realized that this is happening across the country.

We finally — what finally did it in for me was that the minora was left broken for three days, without the administration even being aware of it.  When we placed the complaint to the administration, they said, you know, “It’s an accident; we’ll get right on it.”  And they did — the very next day, they fixed the minora, and they actually lit it for the first time.

But when we were asking them, “What about these hate crimes,” the final — there was this huge hate crime.  There was a — and this happened three days after the holocaust denial conference in Iran, which many of you probably know about.  And there was a big swastika — a big red swastika drawn at the Pleasantville campus, on a holocaust remembrance event that Pleasantville was holding up there.  And the administration labeled that incident a bias incident rather than a hate crime.

And it’s all wordplay.  But at the same time, “bias incident” doesn’t really say anything.  A hate crime puts in that meaning; shows that the administration is aware that problems are happening, and change needs to happen.

We’ve put together a press release.  And with the help of Phil Ornstein, we managed to get the story out to the public.  And within days, lots of different organizations, including Students for Academic Freedom, stepped forward and helped us get our message across, and helped intimidate the administration back; kind of strong-armed them in saying, “Look, you have to start paying attention to what the students are concerned about.  You can’t just enforce your political ideology onto the students; you have to work with them.  You have to address the issues that are — that the students are concerned with.”

And that is what’s happening now.  After months of battling with the administration, they finally are working on a spiritual center.  It’s going to involve having — the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians are going to have their own workplace, where — their own office, so that you could come in, speak whatever you want to speak about; you know, hold the events that you want to hood, without being afraid that the administration or the students around you will be confining you in any other way.  And that’s really what happened at our campus.

And I’d like to just conclude with the fact that every student that experiences this across the country should feel confident that they could go public with this story.  Because there’s hundreds of people out there in this country that are going to support you.  But you have to be prepared for the long fight.  You know, if you’re going to make the public statement, you have to be there for the long run.  Because change is possible, but you just have to believe in it, and you have to want it.

So, thank you very much.

David Horowitz: Thank you, Michael.

Our second speaker is going to be Matt Ferrara of Florida State University.

Matt Ferrara: Thank you, David.

When I was told what the topic of the panel I was going to be on was — Faculty Harassment of Students — I thought, Okay, well, I’m going to have to kind of condense all of this stuff down in order to give it to you in a concise manner.  Because the truth is that faculty harassment of students, unfortunately, is alive and well today in a university system.  And maybe when you think of, you know, bastions of liberal thought, you may not think Florida State University.  But it’s alive and well on campuses across our country.

I’m going to give you a few examples of some things that have happened at Florida State — to my peers, to my friends; people that have come to me and said, “Look, you know, I’ve gone to the chair of the department, I’ve gone to the professor, I’ve gone to the president of the university, and nothing’s being done about some of the things that have happened in the classroom.”

I’ll give you an example of a student in a humanities course, for example.  This student participated in classroom discussion.  This was a discussion-based class where this student was going to receive a grade, based on their participation.  And even though it was a humanities class, the teacher decided to turn the discussion political.  And this student responded from a conservative point of view, because that’s what he was.

The teacher kicked him out of the classroom after supporting President Bush — just straight-up told him to leave the classroom, and pulled him aside afterwards and told him that if he did not drop the course, he would be receiving an F for the semester.

When this student took this complaint to the chair of the department, the chair of the department explained to this student that — and I quote — “If she perceived him as a disruptive influence in class, she was allowed to employ whatever means necessary to achieve her ends.”  So, you know, we’ve got great support from the department heads as well.

Another example — this is a science of nutrition course; you know, obviously a political discussion is going to happen in there.  They have a guest lecturer in this nutrition course who proceeds to spend his 45 minutes of class time not talking about the science of nutrition, but mimicking President Bush and calling him “an incompetent hick who wants too many freedoms.”  Because, you know, those freedoms are — that’s bad stuff.

A theater studies course — there we go — a theater studies course.  I had a student come to me, really upset after taking this course.  And she explained to me how instead of teaching theater studies that this professor would spend an hour and a half each class period talking about how Bush was responsible for 9/11, and at the beginning of this semester told the students that they were expected to see Michael Moore’s film, “Fahrenheit 911,” because it was “a brilliant piece of work.”

In the end, these students were asked to write a paper dealing with the sexual perversity with gender in “Romeo and Juliet.”  After this paper was turned in, this teacher pulled this student aside and told her that her paper was politically driven, and she had no right to express those kinds of opinions in her work.  The irony.

So I mean, these professors that we’ve got in the classroom — you know, they want to exercise their freedoms to say whatever they want in the classroom and tell students whatever they want, and expect things of these students, regardless of these students’ beliefs.  Just — you know, it’s not a two-sided equation; it doesn’t go both ways.

I also — I’ll give you one more story before I conclude here is — this is actually a political science course.  Now none of the courses I’ve given to you so far have even been political science courses.  And politics doesn’t belong in the science of nutrition course.  So this is a public policy course.  And this student was — even raised her hand to ask in a discussion if the teacher was okay if the student had some corrections she would like to make to some of the things the teacher said.  And she told her go ahead.  And this student proceeded to correct some things about the war in Iraq and some weapons of mass destruction that the teacher had mentioned during her lecture that day.  And this student was also told that she needed to drop the class or would receive an F for the semester, and that what she was saying in class was fact and wasn’t opinion.

When this student came to meet with this professor after dropping the course, she provided documentation for the argument she had made in class.  And this professor looked at the documentation, saw the Fox News Channel label on one of the sheets in the top right-hand corner, and told her that anything from that news source was unreliable, and she should not bring it to her.

To conclude, something — a completely different aspect of faculty harassment of students is the issue of funding of campus organizations.  And maybe you don’t consider that harassment.  But when a university is funding liberal organizations, six, 10 times as much as they’re funding conservative organizations, you know, that’s just not fair.

I looked into the budget records of my university.  Our student government this year has a budget of about $10 million that is taxed from our tuition, and every cent of it.  And so the student government allocates these funds based on — basically however they want to.

I looked back to the budgets going back all the way to 1989 and found that on average — and using as my guideline what kind of speakers these organizations brought in – if this organization brought in speakers from both sides of the political spectrum, then I didn’t include them.  If speakers brought in only — or if organizations brought in only one type of speaker from the political spectrum, then I included them as either liberal or conservative.  And on average since 1989, our university has funded liberal organizations between six and 10 times as much as they’ve funded conservative organizations; one year so much as $9,000 to about $120,000.

So I’m here to assure you that it is alive and well.  And conferences like this are helping us to fight the bias.  Thank you.

David Horowitz: Thank you, Matt.

Our next speaker is Logan Fisher, from Temple University.

Logan Fisher: Thank you, Mr. Horowitz.  I feel like a college professor up here; I have a captive audience.  This is great.  That’s what it feels like.

Good morning, everyone.  As he said, my name’s Logan Fisher, formerly from Temple University.  I made it; I graduated.  I spoke out, and I still managed to graduate.  So I guess I’m a success story, if you call it that.

I originally became involved with Students for Academic Freedom during my junior year of undergrad at Temple.  Our chapter really grew out of a base of College Republicans.  You know, we’re always looking for conservative professors on campus, which was quite a task.  A lot of the other organizations had overwhelming faculty involvement in their organizations.  And College Republicans — we struggled for — I was there for three and a half years at Temple, and then we struggled the whole time just to find an advisor.  For about two years, we didn’t have an advisor, even though we were supposed to; we just couldn’t find one.

In December of 2005, I learned that Temple was going to host one of the academic freedom hearings that was being held around the state.  Our favorite legislator, Gib Armstrong — I don’t know where he — there he is, Gib Armstrong — he passed a — there.  Gib passed the bill that authorized a select committee in Pennsylvania to go around to Pennsylvania State and state-related schools.  I think they went to Penn State, Pitt, Temple, maybe Bloomsburg — Millersville — and to look into the state of academic freedom on campus.

And in the few short weeks leading up to the hearing, our group collected close to 20 testimonies, written testimonies, from students.  Again, a lot of them wanted to remain anonymous.

You know, one of the problems is, if you have — say you’re a freshman, and you are a history major, and you have a professor who you don’t agree with, or maybe a professor who’s harassing you — a lot of times, if you’re a history major, you’re going to have to take that same professor again.  So, you know, to speak out when you’re young, as a freshman, against a certain professor — a lot of times, students are hesitant to do so, just because they know they’re going to have to have that professor again.

In the 20 — about 20 testimonies we collected, I was really amazed at some of the things people wrote — you know, as my colleagues have said, lectures about the war in Iraq in accounting class, evolution in micro-economics — let’s see — Mao in a social sciences class.  I was one of two students that agreed to testify publicly before the committee.  Conveniently, it was held during winter break, so there weren’t many students there.  But the press still wondered why there weren’t many students there.  Course, they used that to say that there was not a liberal bias on campus.

After the hearing, the academic freedom issue was pretty hot on campus, as you can imagine.  Professors seemed a little irritated.  How dare we question their blatant bias in the university.  It seems to me the only time a college professor ever speaks out against diversity is when it comes to conservative faculty.

My testimony was also printed in a couple newspapers, but most notably was posted in the faculty newspaper, which made for an interesting situation in a lot of my classes.  Luckily at that point, I was graduating; I only had nine credits at the time.  So it wasn’t too much of a big deal.

I did have one professor — about a week or two after the hearing, he — this was a — I think this was a micro-economics class.  And he said, “Well, I know we’re not supposed to talk about politics in the classroom anymore” — and he glared at me — said, “but I’m going to do so anyway.”  And he gave about a 10-minute lecture on the war in Iraq.

This is a great story.  In March of last year, one of the things I liked to do as a College Republican — there were a couple of conservative faculty.  And we had an agreement where they would kind of let me know what’s going on, and I wouldn’t say where I got the information from.  So I got word from an English professor, who happened to be a closet conservative on campus, that the English faculty — the faculty — were arranging an antiwar protest on campus.  And that was going to be paid for with campus funds, partly.  So he let me know about it.  And we organized a group of College Republicans, Students for Academic Freedom members.  And we actually had a group that was, I’d say, about three or four times larger than the professors’ protest.  The funny thing was they called all the media to come see their protest, and we actually got on TV more than they did.

But that was really interesting, you know.  We got to see the professors outside of the classroom.  And we were surprised that they were far worse than they even were inside the classroom.

Now, we were only a few yards away from their protest.  But we made sure all our students stayed on our side.  We had signs; we had all sorts of things going on, even a — we had blank forms for people to sign to send letters to the troops.  But a couple interesting things that we were called — some professors would come over.  And one in particular, with a “No one died when Clinton lied” button on, screamed at us, including about 10 ROTC students, who were in uniform — called them baby-killers, told us all that we had blood on our hands.  Those of us not in uniform were told that we were sending our brothers and sisters to die — and the always creative one, that we were fighting a war for oil.

One professor asked us if we’d like to comment on the recent story about soldiers raping Iraqi children and women in Iraq.  Another screamed at us to go to hell as she ran by our group.  Actually, a couple reporters and journalists in the media later told us that we acted more adult than the professors did.

In undergrad, I was told what to think.  And unfortunately, it wasn’t until I came to law school that I — beginning to learn how to think.  And that’s unfortunate.  Because, you know, as much as I enjoyed being an activist on campus, when it comes to education, students can’t always afford to fight the battles which their university is supposed to fight for them.  We shouldn’t have to be the ones calling attention to the blatant lack of ideological diversity on campus.

So with that, I just want to conclude.  And I also want to thank Mr. Horowitz and Gib Armstrong.  As I said, Temple is the first university that has an academic freedom policy for the protection of all their students — conservative, liberal, whatever; whatever you happen to be.  So I just want to publicly thank those two.

Thank you.

David Horowitz: Thank you, Logan.

Our next speaker is Matt Sanchez, who’s a corporal in the United States Marine Corps and a student at Columbia.

Matt Sanchez: Hi.  Good morning.

When I was accepted to Columbia, I was really happy.  It’s an Ivy League school.  And growing up as a kid from a wrong side of the tracks in California, I was really impressed with the fact that they’d even let me into the school.  I didn’t realize what was in store for me.  I’ve learned a lot studying at Columbia.  And a lot of it hasn’t been from the classroom.

On Activities Day a year ago, there was about 200 — actually, nearly 600 people out on the campus, and about 70 different clubs.  I was visiting a table that’s called The Hamilton Club.  The Hamilton Club deals with ROTC, and some people who like to study military history.  And I’m not even a member, but I do know people at the table.  We were talking, when this group came up, the ISO.  I don’t know if you have an ISO on your campus.  It’s International Socialist Organization.

They decided that they didn’t want the military on campus.  Now I’m not sure why they identified me as military.  I was dressed as a civilian completely.  I’m a reservist, by the way.  So that means that I’m — I do my duty one time a month.  And they really zeroed in on me, and started screaming and shouting, “Military off campus! Military off campus!”

So I looked at them, said, “Hello.  How are you?  Would you like to join — would you like to join the Hamilton Society?”  I was standing on the other side of the table.  They said, “The miliary, the military, you’re all baby-killers.”  I’ve heard that one before.  Gets really boring and tired.  But they’ve —

Unidentified Audience Member: [inaudible]

Matt Sanchez: We’ve heard — a long time, thanks.  It’s something you hear all the time, and it’s been said on campus since the ‘60s.  It’s something Columbia University’s actually quite proud about — 1968 and throwing the military off campus.

They said that minorities are being exploited by the military.  Now that was curious.  Because I’m a minority; my parents are from Puerto Rico.  The other person behind the table was a Korean American.  There was a Chinese American and a Mexican American.  The people screaming and shouting were all non-minorities.

I said, “Look, I joined the military.  I joined the Marine Corps, and I did so willingly.  And I’m proud to serve.”  Their answer [was], “That’s because you’re too stupid.  You’re too stupid to understand that you’re being used as cannon fodder by the military complex.”

Now, at this point, they had pretty much everyone’s attention.  That was — that’s their deal; I mean, something that they really like to do.  They like to draw attention to themselves.  This is a group that has a table, come rain or shine, in the middle of campus.  And they hand out this little piece of paper.  They usually sell it for a buck, which is interesting for a socialist organization.

In fact, one time they offered me a paper, “The Worker.”  And they said, “Well, we’re asking a dollar for this.”  And I said, “Why a dollar?  Aren’t you socialists?” They said, “Yes, but the printer isn’t.”  I said, “That should be your first clue.”

After that, that day, just really being embarrassed in front of everyone on campus, I decided really not to touch this group.  Because there’s really no way of engaging them.  I mean, they really scream at the top of their lungs.  And just engaging them just makes things worse.  So I went right to the administration.  And that was the beginning of all my problems.

The first comments I got back from the administration was, “Well, what did you do to incite them?  Were you wearing anything military-like?  Were you talking about the military?  Were you passing out any military literature?  Were you presenting yourself in a militaristic fashion?”  I responded with no fewer than 20 to 25 meetings; wrote many petitions, went back and forth.

And in the meantime, the ISO decided that they wanted to protest me personally.  So what they did is they took a picture of me, blew it up; took a picture of a dead Iraqi kid, blew that up; and took a picture of a homeless veteran.  And they decided to parade in front of the university, holding up these signs and handing out fliers.

So I complained of harassment; filed an official complaint.  The administration said that they weren’t on campus.  They were, in fact, in front of the campus, so that there was nothing they could do.  Fine.

The next day, that same protest was actually on campus.  I filed another protest.  And the administration claimed that it would take another seven-day period before I could file a consequent protest.  There’s really no way to win when we talk about things like military bias, and how to prove these things.

We had a marine who was stationed in Fallujah.  Now this is an officer whose job it is to find IEDs.  I got a letter from him, from Fallujah.  And he asked if I could help him with a problem he was having with his tuition.  Apparently, he had deployed, which was all very legal — you deploy and you get to drop your classes, and they can’t charge you for them.  But apparently he had been charged for the whole year in tuition.  So there was an outstanding charge on his bill.

His dean unfortunately didn’t want to work with him.  And I — it’s something, again, that you can’t really prove, except for the fact that it was a really simple matter.  Somebody just needed to sign off that this man was indeed not at Columbia, and come back, and get another signature.  In the end, it didn’t happen.  It really took several members of our club, Military Veterans at Columbia, to get this done.

Since then, I went — I took this public.  And takes a lot of energy to do something like this.  You do a lot of talking, you do a lot of repeating your stories; a lot of writing.  And what I learned was, people want to take action.  So since then, I’ve begun a campaign to bring more veterans to Columbia University.  And so far it seems to be working out.

Also, a last note, last year, after — as a result of this incident, they changed the bias categories to include veterans.

Thank you very much.

David Horowitz: Our next speaker is Jason Walter.  He’s an Iraq war veteran who is at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.

Jason Walter: Thank you.

I was asked here today to tell you about two stories.  One is when I came back.  And the other is when David came to our campus, and the repercussions that myself and two other students had to bear because of him coming to the campus.

When I got back from Iraq — I’m a political science student.  And I had a class with a professor there who, when I had weekend drills, would count those attendances against me.  The Friday I’d have to leave because my drill was in Maryland, and we, of course, are in Pennsylvania.  Well, it takes four hours to get to my drill from the university.  So I’d have to leave at around noon, because I had to be there at 5:00.

So I would leave at noon, and her class was conveniently at 2:00 in the afternoon.  So I would get docked points for Friday and Monday, and she would never allow me to either turn my assignments in early or to turn my assignments in late.

So consequently, by the end of this semester with me fighting with her over these absences, I ended up with a D and almost failing the class.  So now I have to take the class over again.  And it is a required class for the major.  So if I choose not to take it, I will never graduate.  So I’m left with kind of a big predicament there.

And this is the same professor that, in her classroom, will say, “Oh, the President — did you see the President lowered gas prices again?  They’re trying to get the Republicans reelected.”  Well, these type of comments — I mean, we have no control over anything that OPEC does.  I mean, the United States isn’t an OPEC nation.  So she uses these type of things in class to basically sway people’s opinions.  And she doesn’t really allow you to think.  And if you try to think on your own, then it’s penalized, especially if you’re in the military.

Once David came to the campus, he invited the College Republicans out to dinner.  So we all went out to dinner with him.  And we sat around.  It was just, you know, a little leisurely dinner, where we would tell him about the complaints, and things that have happening to us on campus.

Well, three of us in particular spoke out about the same professor.  And so when David went and met with the president of the university after his debate with Dr. Kurt Smith, he told the professor of the university, Dr. Kozloff, that this one professor was a problem.

Well, this got back to us, and we were asked to come to a meeting.  And we weren’t officially summoned to the meeting; we were told that we must be there by our advisor.  And our advisor came to us and told us, “Hey, you know, you need to come to this meeting, you need to come to this meeting.”

Well, we get there, and of course we all dressed in suits, because we thought it was a formal meeting.  And the two professors that brought this meeting to everybody’s attention and made such a big stink about this came in sweat suits and a sweatshirt.

And so, we started the meeting.  And the very first words that came out of the one professor’s mouth was, “The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the events of the night that David Horowitz came here and you ate dinner with him, and to press charges against academic integrity on you three students for lying.”

So we basically were faced up against the wall right away.  And when you walk into a meeting and somebody says that, that kind of immediately starts you off on the bad foot in the meeting and kind of scares you to death.

So we went through the entire meeting.  And after the meeting was almost done, the Dean of the Liberal Arts Department, Dr. George Agbango, came in and adjourned the meeting.  And he told them — he told both Professor Zolli and Professor Smith that the meeting should have never taken place and was totally out of line.

Well, we have the dean’s class on Wednesdays.  It was African Political Systems.  He held the three of us after class and officially apologized from the university to us for that ever happening.  So the attempted ambush by the two liberal professors was, in the end, halted only because we made such a big stink about it.  And without David’s help, that would have never happened.

So thank you very much.

David Horowitz: Thank you, Jason.

Actually, the College Republicans invited me to dinner.  And it was Jason who — Jason called me when they were summoned to this meeting.  And without coordinating this, I fired off letters to Dean Agbango and to the president of the university, which I suspect had something to do with their response.  But Jason also took it upon himself to visit Dean Agbango and tell him what was going on.

So what that — what this story shows is that there is still, in the university, a consensus about fairness.  It’s just getting the machinery engaged to defend the students.  That’s the problem now.  And that’s what our agenda really is — it’s to — by getting these student bills of rights at universities, and by raising awareness of this problem — which is what this conference is doing, and every agitation that we conduct is doing — FrontPage Magazine has publicized all of this — that we will finally wake up the conscience of the university.  It will remain in liberal hands.  But if it’s fair, you know, it’s not a bad educational experience for our students to have to test themselves against oppositional ideas.  But that’s provided that it’s fair and professional.

Our final speaker is Ruth Malhotra, who is a student at Georgia Tech.

Ruth Malhotra: [Thank] you so much.  It’s great to see you all this morning.  And I just actually found out that I was on the panel a few minutes before.  So I’ll do my best to, you know, tell my story, and condense and hit the high points — or, I guess, you’d call it the low points.

But again, it’s great to see you all.  And I really, you know, appreciated everyone up here sharing their stories and, you know, just really demonstrating, you know, what it is that we’re dealing with in this fight that we’re in.

And in many ways, I’ve been fighting this battle for a long time.  I know David Horowitz has been fighting for me for the past several years.  I know a few years ago, I came to CPAC.  First day of class, professor threatened to fail me if I came to the Conservative Political Action Conference.  She actually ended up following through on that.

Following that, you know, years of my speech being censored, protests being shut down by campus police — one thing after another — issues of censorship, and the institute really pushing an unbalanced agenda.  And, you know, after a long time of, you know, trying to fight these things internally, you know, like many of these students did, the situation only got worse.  And realized — myself and another student, Orit Sklar, who’s here with me from Georgia Tech — realized that the only way to effectively confront these problems was to file a federal civil rights lawsuit in court and demand that these unconstitutional policies be repealed.

And — yes.  We ended up doing that in March, March 16th.  It’s been almost a year.  It’s a free speech and religious liberty case, and we won the first part of it.  We got our speech code repealed in August, which was a huge victory; it prohibited any speech that was considered “intolerant or offensive,” obviously very selectively and arbitrarily defined and enforced.  But the rest of our case still moves on.

And, you know, when I — obviously many of us have chosen to express ourselves and our convictions, and to take on these issues and challenge them.  And we expect — you know, we expect debate, and we expect opposition.  But what I didn’t expect is just how extreme the reaction would be from the left and those who oppose us.

And started out with — there was a group formed on campus called CLAM — Conservatives and Liberals Against Malhotra.  That was fun.  They actually did a protest with Twinkies, handing out fliers and Twinkies, saying that I was yellow on the outside and white on the inside.

Most recently, on Valentine’s Day — actually, the day before Valentine’s Day — I received a rape threat from someone threatening to rape me on Valentine’s Day.  And again, these are, you know, criminal activities, where they’re resorting to illegal.  And of course, the administration has done nothing.  And the — you know, the consensus seems to be, “Well, you asked for it.”  You know, “She asked for it.  And, you know, that’s what she gets.”

And, you know, like I said, you know, you expect opposition; you expect a good debate.  You know, I would — you know, I love to engage in this debate on — you know, when it comes to free speech and religious liberty issues.  But just in our situation and everything that, you know, I’ve personally encountered over the past several months, really been thinking about what does this demonstrate?  What does this demonstrate about the fight that we’re in?

And I think the first thing, as I mentioned earlier, is it demonstrates how extreme our opposition can be.  This is what we’re up against.  I mean, from, you know — I mentioned, you know, the instance where I failed my class a few years ago.  I know there were some other references to similar instances.  But just from there, I mean — just when you think it can’t get any worse, I mean, it does.

And I keep thinking things are going to get better.  But, you know, in recent months and weeks, these threats have only intensified.  And the people who oppose us will really stop at nothing.  I mean, we’re college kids up here.  You know, we are in school, on campus, to learn and to get our degree; to engage in debate, to express our ideas, to be out there with College Republicans; you know, recruiting people, spreading our — just spreading ideas and, you know, having a good time doing it.

And for them to give us — I sometimes joke with people — I say that, you know, people who oppose us, I think, give us too much blame.  And then people here — sometimes I feel like, you know, give me too much credit.

At the end of the day, you know, we’re college students, obviously on campus with a purpose.  But the left, and people who oppose our ideas and what we stand for, really, you know, will stop at nothing.  And I think that — I mean, that’s been obviously demonstrated very clearly to me in recent months.

I think another thing that it demonstrates is the fact that as challenging as these things are, we are winning this fight.  And the left is growing increasingly threatened that, you know, their stronghold is being challenged, and they are losing ground.  And because we win and will continue to win, you know, they are — they’re scared.  And I think that should serve to encourage us, you know, that they’re going to do whatever they can to try to thwart our effectiveness.  But, you know, we can’t let that happen.

And finally, I think perhaps what this demonstrates most clearly to me — and something that I’ve really tried to hold onto, and remind myself of every day — is that we cannot afford to give up.  It’s hard; it’s a tough fight.  Yes, there’s great things about it.  It’s very rewarding.  And we — you know, many of us have had very rewarding experiences as a result of the stands we’ve taken.  But at the end of the day, it’s tough, and it’s hard work.  And you’re out there day in and day out on campus.

But one of my favorite Scripture versus from the Bible is from the Book of Galatians.  It’s Galatians 6:9.  And it says, “Let us not grow weary in doing good, because in due season we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”  And it’s so easy on campus to grow weary and to give up, and to want to do that, but we can’t afford to.  Because if we stick with it, we will reap a harvest.  And it will be worth it.

So thank you all so much.

David Horowitz: Thank you.

I’ve been notified by two different people that I failed in my headcount.  I was looking down there, and I missed Brad Alexander, who is a student at — you at the University of Georgia — at the University of Georgia, and whose case we took up quite a few years ago.

Bradley, go ahead.

Bradley Alexander: Yes, I’d like to start by saying — and thanking Mr. Horowitz and SAF for inviting me to this very important event.

I’d also like to start by saying that while my testimony isn’t as dramatic as some of the rest, I think it’s more typical of what happens probably every day, at least at University of Georgia and the State of Georgia on our campuses.

When I was a sophomore, I was a history major, which is no longer the case.  I signed up for a class that sounded very interesting — it was “History of the World Wars,” with a professor who was supposed to be an expert on the subject — or is an expert on the subject.

But when I got to the class, I really had no prior knowledge of him at all, which has been charged.  But instead of being introduced to the course on the Word Wars, I was given a 75-minute screed against the Bush Administration, and an explanation of why George Bush and Dick Cheney are historically “chickenshit.”  That’s right.  From there, he, you know, gave the usual spiel about how Iraq is simply a venture to profit — build profit for oilmen, and that sort of thing.

I mean, it was really the most unbelievable experience I’ve had at the university — it was surreal — that a man — a tenured professor, a full professor, who’s supposedly an academic expert on the World Wars — could be so one-sided and poisonous in his speech.

For instance, he charged that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction at all.  You know, I’m not an expert like he is, but I challenged him.  I thought, you know, that’s certainly incorrect.  And he interjected in the middle of my comment.  He said, “Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”  He said, “We kill innocent people all the time.  And it’s people like you who are at fault.”

I just — I couldn’t believe it.  I really kind of brushed it off at first.  And I was later — about two weeks later — introduced to Students for Academic Freedom and asked to write an article for FrontPage Magazine, which was a short summary of what happened.  I didn’t have any notes, so I had to recall from memory what took place.  But it was really quite unbelievable.

He even described about how if we told the administration about what happened that he would have the dean fired, or that he had had the dean fired, and that, quote-unquote, if he saw him in the hall, “His ass is mine.”

This went on for the entire class period and actually continued after class.  Everyone was shocked.  No one challenged him but me.  I thought it probably expedient to drop the course — which you can do within the first week with no penalty at UGA — and pick up another one.  I didn’t see any reason to put my GPA in the hands of such an irresponsible man.

But after the article came out, I was summoned to the Office of Legal Affairs, where they were very interested in what I had to say, since it became public.  It was very productive, the interview with an attorney named Beth Bailey, until the end, where I was walking out, and she said tersely, “Well, I feel sorry for you.  But this Horowitz character obviously has an agenda.”  I looked at her, and I said, “You can’t possibly be serious.”  And I just walked out.

I was later told by an acquaintance — who I met through the experience, who was in the class — that from then on out, for two weeks straight, Dr. Morrow, who was the teacher of the course, described the “tactics” I used as similar to those used by the Ku Klux Klan.  He happened to be black American.  Just really unbelievable.

But I’ve since changed my major to political science and newspaper, since every history professor actually signed a petition coming out against me, which is totally absurd.  And Professor Morrow actually hired a lawyer, as if, you know, I was actually threatening him and the university was going to take action, which they never did.  They talked to him about his profanity, but totally swept the issue of academic freedom under the table.

I think this dismissive attitude towards academic freedom definitely harms conservative and liberal students, but maybe liberal students more than conservatives.  If you’re at UGA, the conservative activists and liberal activists have totally different perspectives.  The liberal students are encouraged by this dismissive attitude towards academic freedom, towards slavish conformity, in a total disregard for facts and for argument; while the conservatives are challenged to actually establish their arguments and read and write on their subjects.

Actually, I edit a conservative magazine at UGA.  And it was stolen — it’s been stolen many times.  But the campus paper, which is very liberal — their editorial page said that it may be politically justifiable to steal our paper, since we’re intolerant and inflammatory.  It’s really — it’s the kind of thing that happens every week in some shape or form at UGA.  It’s discouraging for students — like me especially, for a College Republican — to — or comprise a large majority of students who are conservative and are attacked like this in the classroom.

I’ve had students — I started Students for Academic Freedom shortly after this at UGA.  And since then, I’ve been approached by students who want to voice their opinion but are scared to actually put their name forward.  Because they’re going to have to change their major, like I did.

It’s impossible to be in an art class without going through something similar to what I did in Dr. Morrow’s history course.  But most conservative students simply take it and move on.  Because it’s not worth it.  It’s not worth — they don’t think it’s worth it to stand up to the liberal academics the way Ruth has.  And it’s obviously taken a toll on those who have.

But again, I’d like to thank Mr. Horowitz for what he does, and SAF for inviting me.  Thank you very much.

David Horowitz: Thank you.

If one were to do a book on students like this, one would have to call it “Courage Under Fire.”

One of the perversities of our times is that people whose fundamental instinct is totalitarian are called liberals.  I can’t — these are horrific stories that you just heard — the idea that when a student is subjected to the kind of treatment that you just heard from Bradley, they would be hauled in before the Legal Affairs person in the school, or that an entire department — people often accuse me of cherry-picking and exaggerating.  You have a whole history department defend reprehensible, unprofessional behavior like Professor Morrow’s in a classroom, you know you have a very, very big problem.  This is not just an isolated few.

Washington, D.C.  March 4, 2007

Participants:

Gib Armstrong; Pennsylvania District 13; Senator

Paul Gourley; College Republican National Committee; Chairman

Steve Miller; Duke University; Student

Tom Robbins; College Republican National Committee; Treasurer

Todd Taylor; Penn State College Republicans; President

Nate Walton; Bates University; Student

Gib Armstrong: This panel is going to discuss, “What Can We Do.”

You know, when this issue was brought to my attention, a couple years ago when I was in the legislature, I was advised by some of my own conservative Republican colleagues, “Don’t get involved.  Higher ed. will come after you with both barrels.  And you’re going to pay a price.”  And my answer was twofold.  The first part is I said, “Look, it doesn’t matter.  That’s what we’re here for.”  And secondly, “There’s no way we can lose.”  They already owned the whole battlefield at the time.  So thinking back to my Marine Corps strategy, if they own the whole battlefield and you don’t own any, no matter which way you go, you’re advancing.  And we’ve seen evidence of that here this weekend.

What can we do?  There’s three things I’d like to recommend to frame this panel.  The first is to say thank you.  Thank you to David, and thank you to your team.  Without David and the people behind him who work so hard, like Sara, Brad, Missy and many others, we would not have the ability to do what we do with as great effect.

I also want to thank you students for having the courage to stand up.  And you give me hope that freedom is alive and well in the next generation of Americans.  And you to me are heroes.  Heroes are ordinary people who do extraordinary things.  And as we’ve seen here this morning, many of you are doing extraordinary things.

The second thing we need to do is understand the nature of the struggle.  This is a struggle about freedom, and it’s a struggle about truth.  It’s a struggle about, are you going to make choices for yourself, or is someone else going to make those choices for you?  When you’re free, you make the choices for yourself.  When you’re in bondage or poverty, someone else chooses for you.

Matt, in the last panel, quoted a professor who said that Bush is some hick who just wants too many freedoms.  There it is, right there.  The left hates freedom.  They want to be in control.  And that is why Islamic fascism and our socialist, left-wing professors on our college campuses are natural allies; they both hate freedom.  And they also don’t like the truth.

You know, Christ said that you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.  We here, as College Republicans, as Students for Academic Freedom, as American citizens — we’re not interested in replacing a left-wing speech code for a right-wing speech code.  All we want is a level playing field.  And on a level playing field, the truth, the best ideas, will stand on their own merit.  But that’s all we need is just a level playing field for the truth to win out.  Those who want to destroy your freedom, your prosperity and your liberty obfuscate the truth.

The third thing — the first thing we do is we say thank you.  Secondly, understand the nature of the struggle.  And then thirdly, stand up.  And that’s what this conference is about.  Many of you are standing up, and you’re paying a personal price.

And for those of you who know students who say, “Well, I’d kind of like to stand up, but I’m not really sure if I should,” shame on you.  I think it was Franklin who said that those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither.  And if your freedom isn’t worth something to you, isn’t worth a little bad grade once in awhile, then maybe you don’t deserve to have it.

And for those of us that have paid a price, we’re the better for it.  Because we now know the preciousness of freedom and the preciousness of liberty.  And we know what we’re willing to stand up for.

You know, we’ve experienced some losses; we’ve experienced many victories, especially in Pennsylvania, with the help of David and his team.  But there’s still a long road ahead of us.  And it’s an uphill road.  But you know, I think back to — I think it was Thomas Payne who said, at Valley Forge, that, you know, these are the times that try men’s souls.  At the end of that quote, he says that the more arduous the struggle, the more glorious the triumph.  And that triumph someday will be ours.

The dam has been breeched.  There’s now a crack in the dam.  And every day, there’s more water flowing through it.  And it’s only a matter of time until we see in academia in the United States a level playing field, as long as we keep with it.

After we stand up, we have to — and again, we’re not interested in posing a left-wing — or replacing a left-wing speech code with a right-wing speech code.  What we want is simply accountability.  But those who reject the truth and want to take away your freedom — they don’t like accountability.  So they’re fighting us at every step of the way.

As we stand up, as we speak the truth, as we seek greater accountability, as we seek a level playing field — as Ruth so ably articulated this morning, when the going gets tough, just remember, never, never, never give in.  Just keep fighting, and the result will be worth it.  And even if we don’t succeed, even if we don’t get everything we want — in Pennsylvania, we didn’t get everything we wanted.  But we still got a lot further ahead than we were when we started.

So it’s an honor to be with you this morning.  We’ve got some panelists who are going to talk about what can we do.  Many of them, as I said, are heroes in their own right.  They know what it’s like to take a few shots for standing up for things that they believe in.

The first person I’d like to introduce is Paul Gourley, who’s the Chairman of the College Republicans National Committee.  Thank you for being with us this morning, Paul.

Paul Gourley: Thanks, Gib.

Well, thank you, Gib, for the introduction and those remarks.  You’re a great ally to us in Pennsylvania, and really helped pave the way for what we hope to do in every state across the country.  And I want to say thank you to David for having me here today.  You are a great ally in our fight against the left on campus.  And that’s really what, I think, we need to focus on, is our allies, our friends.

What resources can we rely on on campus in this important fight?  Who here is a College Republican?  Wow, just about every hand goes up.  That’s pretty great.  That’s pretty great.  But being a College Republican is not just enough; we have to use our organization and utilize our organization on campus for this fight.

I think that College Republicans are one of the strongest grass-roots organizations in the country.  I don’t think anybody would dispute that — that when it comes to knocking on doors and making phone calls, and getting out the vote for Republican candidates; we’re there early, we stay late, and we work hard until, you know, the votes are cast and we’ve won.  But when the election’s over historically, we go to sleep.  We disappear.  We slide away from campus.

But we need to change that.  We need to change the culture of our College Republican clubs on campus to do more every single day in this fight for academic freedom.  We need to use your membership, your money, your voice, your resources and your group on campus to pass this Academic Bill of Rights with your student governments and with your board of regents, and at your universities.  You need to — you need to not just use David Horowitz and the Academic Freedom Center as a resource for you, but you need to give this movement your resources from College Republicans.

I think that we’ve done great things in Pennsylvania.  I think that we’ve got a lot of great things going in states across the country.  But we need to do more, and we need to do more now, using your College Republicans.  Because it’s tough, as a conservative on campus, to stand alone.  But when you’re in this group, and if you can do this as a group, you’re not alone.  You’re much more powerful as a group and as an organization.

So I’d encourage you, now that the election is over, and before we gear up for 2008, to use your College Republican club aggressively to pass the Academic Bill of Rights on your campus and in your state.  Thanks, Ed.

I suppose you’ve all been to CPAC this week, so you’ve been hearing people speak to you nonstop.  I look forward to your questions.  So I’m going to make these remarks very brief.  And I look forward to hearing what’s going on out there with you guys.  Thank you.

Thanks, Gib.

Gib Armstrong: Well, our next panelist is a man who needs no introduction to many of us.  While he’s not playing in his band, Steve Miller is active at Duke University and is going to talk to us about the power and the influence that one college student can have.

Steve Miller: First of all, I just wanted to say thank you to David for having me here, and for everything that all of us here know that he does for this country and for our movement.  I think I speak for many college students when I say that he’s provided us just with tremendous inspiration and resources, and that he’s made change and progress possible where otherwise it would not have been.  So thank you, David.

I’d like to just very briefly today talk about two different things that demonstrate how you can make a difference on your college campus, with just some very specific, concrete ideas.

The first is a 9/11 memorial that I organized this year in the 5th anniversary of 9/11.  Now, in the previous years on campus, there really had been no recognition at all of the September 11th tragedy.  And to the extent that there had been, they’d been very politically correct and had emphasized the importance of having a response of peace and love to whoever our enemies might be, and to not looking at what actually happened on that day, which of course is very unfortunate.  Because part of that tragedy was the absolute horror of those attacks, and the evil of the enemies that committed them.

And so I decided I was going to bring a 9/11 memorial to campus, which of course would be nonpartisan but would emphasize the traditional values which unified America and which any proper memorial ought to have.  In order for this memorial to happen, though, it was necessary to get school funding of at least several thousand dollars.  Because I wanted to have a very large, expansive memorial that would befit a university the size of Duke.

Now unfortunately, the school didn’t seem to have much interest in funding the memorial, which didn’t come as a tremendous surprise, considering how politically correct Duke University was.  But I felt like there had to be a way to get Duke University behind such an important project.

So what I decided to do was to go to the city council and to see if I could get some city councilmen to support the project, and turn the Duke memorial into a sort of community memorial.  Fortunately for me, I got two city councilmen onboard, as well as the city manager.  And I also got in touch with the fire department and got them onboard as well.

And so for anybody who wants to organize a 9/11 memorial at their school, I would suggest both going to the fire department, the police department and the city council as an excellent way to get important backers for your project — and that when I had some of them express their support for the project to the school, the school’s tune started to change a little bit.  Because they realized that they would have to be saying no not just to me, but no to the city councilmen and the fire department as well.

And so shortly after I got them onboard, the school turned around, and they gave us about $5,000 for the memorial which, in addition to some money we got from Veterans of Foreign Wars, put us in very good standing.

The memorial consisted of a 2,997-flag display in the main quad in front of the Duke Chapel, one flag for each life taken on 9/11.  We had a display in the Brian Center honoring the policemen and the firemen that sacrificed their lives so nobly on that day.  We screened the film “United 93″ to share the sacrifice of the brave men and women of that flight.  And we handed out flag pins all over campus, so people could show their support for the country that had been so brutally attacked on 9/11.  And then we had an evening memorial service with the fire department and the police honor guard.  And we had the fire department chaplain, and the we had the dean of our Duke Chapel and city councilmen give a speech.

And about 1,000 students came to this thing.  And it was outside, and it was just one of the most moving evenings that I’ve ever had.  And it was just amazing to see how the campus came together for this 9/11 memorial, which — and I’d never seen such an outpouring of patriotism on Duke’s campus before in my entire time there.

And it just showed me that there are students that are looking for the chance to show their patriotism and to unite behind their fellow Americans as we look back on the horrible tragedy of 9/11, and that it was just up to some concerned students to bring that opportunity to them, because the university wouldn’t.  And it was amazing how many kids ended up helping out on this project, more than any other project I’d ever worked on in my entire life.

And it was so great to have this memorial on campus which wasn’t at all politically correct, or any way modified to not harm people’s various sensibilities, but just to talk about what happened on that day and to mourn that terrible, horrific loss.  And I would suggest to anybody as an excellent and meaningful and moving project to do on your campus, to organize such a memorial.  And it really was one of the — just the most stirring and meaningful experiences in my life to be part of that.

The other thing I just wanted to briefly talk to you about was the Terrorism Awareness Project, which some of you have already heard about and seen this weekend.  But the Terrorism Awareness Project, which was founded only a matter of weeks ago, is a project that we’re trying to bring to college campuses across America, through the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which is basically, as David has described, a Paul Revere mission to wake people up to the threat of Islamic terror.

And so far, we have about 45 campus coordinators bringing this project to their campuses.  And as I said, we’re only a few weeks old.  And basically, the idea is — take films like “Obsession,” and bring speakers like Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, and get this message onto college campuses about Islamic fascism and about the terror threat; the idea being that we can’t be victorious in our defense against violent Islamic jihad unless we understand the nature of the enemy and the nature of the threat.  The cost of our ignorance, the cost of our complacency, ultimately will be lethal.

So you really couldn’t have a more crucial mission to bring to the youth of this country, who will be the stewards for the next generation, than to talk to them about the threat of radical Islam and Islamic jihad.

I would encourage all kids that are going to college campuses — I myself have brought the project to Duke — to go ahead and join this effort.  You can incorporate it into the College Republicans.  For instance, one of the things that we’re working on, that could potentially be huge, is doing a screening of “Obsession” on as many college campuses as we can in America on the same day, to wake people up, to show them — as Senator Santorum was speaking last night — why they actually do hate us; what the threat actually is.

And I truly believe that if we wake up this generation of youth, that we can be victorious in the struggle, which I think — and I think many of us think — is indeed the greatest struggle America has ever faced.

And in closing, let me just say that the key to success or failure for this nation as a whole really does depend on what happens with the youth.  And so much of that depends upon what happens on our college campuses.  So the fight that we’re fighting on our campuses could not possibly be more vital.  And in a very significant way, the future of this country depends upon it.

Thank you.

Gib Armstrong: Next we have Tom Robbins.  And Tom is the Treasurer for the College Republican National Committee.  And Tom’s going to come and talk to us this morning about how to get some things done.  Tom?

Tom Robbins: Well, this morning I want to talk a little bit about my perspectives, and things that I’ve been involved with when I was the State Chairman of the Utah College Republicans, and some of the things that happened to me as I traveled across Utah organizing campaigns.  And I think as far as — if we’re looking to get things done, or to be effective, I’ve found that the principle of “those who show up are the people that make decisions and get things done” is a true principle — that you just have to be willing to show up; that you just have to be willing to offer yourselves, to volunteer, and to be involved and to be active, and to organize for candidates.

And oftentimes, especially during the 2004 election, I would show up in my broken-down, almost-completely dead Chevy Cavalier, with my trunk full of campaign signs.  And I would bust onto a college campus with a bundle of energy, with clipboards in one hand, and a [roll of] college book and stickers in the other.  And I’d go from campus to campus organizing College Republicans in the state of Utah, so that we could be victorious on Election Day.

And I remember one particular time that we decided that we were going to target Salt Lake Community College.  Because we didn’t have an active campus there.  So I took the time, and I figured out when they were going to have their opening club fair.  And I looked online, and I talked to some people that are affiliated with the campus.  And I found out they just did not — having a function or known-of active College Republican chapter.  And considering that it was Salt Lake, and it was Utah, I knew that there were students on campus who wanted to be anxiously engaged, who, as part of their academic experience, wanted to be able to participate in campaigns.

So I went to campus that day.  I can’t remember — I can remember showing up, and I was all excited.  And I met the organizer.  And I stuck out my hand and said, “Hi, my name’s Tom Robbins, the State Chairman of College Republicans.  And I’m here to organize a College Republican chapter on your campus today.”  “Did you fill out a form before?  I mean, do you have the paperwork necessary to be able to do that?”  “Well, this is the thing — we don’t have anyone on your campus right now that I know of.  I’ve talked to some professors and things; they don’t know of anyone.  But I know you guys are having this club fair.  Can I just — I just want to engage your students, and see who we can get.”  “Yeah, you’re going to need, like, five people — or I don’t know exactly the number — to be able to sign.  And they’re going to have to file that with our offices to be able to authorize your table.”  “Well, the thing is, like, I have the stickers right here, and I got the clipboards, and I showed up on campus, and I’m ready to roll.  And I know that if I — I just need to — they’re going to — the students are showing up.  I just need to engage them and get them involved.”  “Yeah.  Let me get back to you.”

So about — I think it was about 20 or 30 minutes, I just started setting up a table that I found.  And after about 20 or 30 minutes, the lady said, “Okay.  Well, I guess so.”  All right.

Now I’d been trained by Paul Gourley and other great Americans on how to recruit on college campuses effectively.  And I’d worked with allied organizations like LI, who I now train for.  And so I knew how to effectively recruit College Republicans on a college campus.

So I stuck my Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on.  And I was interested in engaging students who wanted to be a part of our cause and who wanted to see us and be involved.  And so I stood out in front of my table; I didn’t stand behind them, or get a book out, like many of the other club organizers were doing, hoping that someone came to their table.  And I stood proudly out.  And I said, “Do you want to help elect President Bush?  Do you want to be a College Republican?  Do you want to help elect the President?”  And wouldn’t you know it, people said, “Yeah, that’s awesome.  You’re involved with the Bush campaign?  You can get me involved?”  “Yeah, let’s sign you up — be a College Republican.”

Couple minutes later, same lady — “Yeah.  Going to have to ask you to take the Bush-Cheney sticker off.”  I’m like, “Okay.”  “Yeah, you — going to ask you to stop passing those out as well.”  I’m like, “Little confused.  Just bring me up to speed.  What’s happening?”  “Thing is, you said you wanted to organize College Republicans?  This is actually for a specific campaign, President Bush’s campaign.  We’re going to have to go ahead and ask you to just ask people to join College Republicans, and refrain from saying, ‘Would you want to help elect President Bush?’”

Folks, I’m at Salt Lake Community College.  I don’t know if you’ve looked on the map; we’re a red state.  I knew there was — I knew there were students on campus who wanted to be involved.  I’m like — I mean, I wanted to say, you know, you guys have [seen the office space] — “Yeah, sorry if you didn’t get the memo.  College Republicans, if I didn’t explain up-front, are going to be doing a few things to help elect the President of the United States.”

Needless to say, unfortunately at that time, what happens to a lot of us is I had to bite my tongue.  Instead of having it out with her at that moment, I just said, “Do you want to join College Republicans?  Do you want to join College Republicans,” to get my list full, and to be able to go back on that campus like I did, two and three other times, to be able to organize that club, and to be able to plug them in opportunities.

Because I believe as part of your campus experience, you need to be plugged into opportunities.   And part of that is being able to work on campaigns.  So that was a little bit of an unfortunate experience.

But the principle is that things get done in this country, or in campaigns especially, by those people who are willing to show up.  And that day, I showed up, and then we were able to successfully organize College Republicans.  And we got volunteers to work on campaigns in ‘04.

Now, when I was at Utah State University — the kind of other sphere I have to talk about, you know, academic freedom and whatnot — we had our typical things.  They paid $23,000 to have Spike Lee come on campus, and he didn’t have any prepared remarks.  He just got up there, and he was like — first thing out of his mouth — “Yeah, I’m against the war in Iraq.”  I thought you made films, buddy.  Like, hello, we paid you $23,000 in student fees.

And we got upset about it.  We went to our student administration.  And the student — or the administration said — we said, “You paid $23,000.  This guy didn’t have any prepared remarks.  He was completely unprofessional.  He didn’t engage — he didn’t go to a class afterwards and lecture, or really engage in any academic stuff.  We want to bring somebody on campus to talk about the war in Iraq, maybe why it’s a good idea to be there.”  “Yeah, we can give you five hundo for that.”

But we got in contact with Young Americas Foundation.  And they’re a great organization, just like LI and the organizations we’re working with today.  And they were able to provide us with a speaker, who went out to lunch with us before, who offered himself to talk and lecture in classes if he wanted to afterwards, and was able to, just for $500, come on our campus and give a great speech just about the things that were going on, and why conservatives supported the war in Iraq, and offered that alternative viewpoint on campus.

Utah State University’s a fun place.  And I had a lot of fun there, kind of just trying to promote the conservative message and organize College Republicans.  And the last thing I wanted to talk about is Coca-Cola.

This is just about as American as you can get — Coca-Cola.  But Utah State, like a lot of places in Utah that I’ve visited when I was organizing College Republicans — they don’t really operate in the free market.  And they — for example, their bookstore would make it very difficult for students to be able to go online and get books, and all those different things.

And we started an organization called Stop Monopolies On Campus.  And our idea was to bring free-market ideas to the Utah State University campus.  I know that’s a really novel idea.

And so we had a lot of success.  We actually put a lot of pressure on the bookstore.  And with the power of the Internet, now that students could log on and go onto Amazon and get some of their textbooks and stuff, they’ve had to compete in that environment.  And we challenged them to compete in that environment.

And one of the things that they’ve done since I’ve left Utah State University is apparently they’ve formed a student committee to get some input.  And one day, a student said, I guess, “We would like Cokes on campus at the bookstore.  Because sometimes I buy a book or a sweatshirt or like that, and I want a Coke; it’s not there.  Can you do that?”  And they said, “Okay.  We want to provide that customer service.”

Unfortunately, they provided that customer service for $0.99.  And Dining Services was like, “Well, here on campus, we actually charge $1.49 for that.  So you’re going to have to go ahead, bookstore, and raise your prices, if that’s okay.  You’re going to have to remove your cooler of Cokes for $0.99.”

Well fortunately, the Utah Statesman, the student newspaper, was alerted about this.  And they wrote an article called, “Losing Its Fizz, Sodas being removed from the Bookstore at request of Food Services.”  This is Utah State University which, in one level, is teaching economics classes; in the other level is running a monopoly through their Food Services.

And these are some of the gem quotes from Chuck Weaver, the Director of USU Dining Services.  He says he doesn’t understand why the bookstore is trying to get into that market.  “It’s traditional item for Food Services,” Weaver said.  “I don’t want to get into the bookstore business.  I don’t know why they’d want to get into the convenience store business.”  Maybe because students want a fair price for an item that they’ve asked for.  And they don’t want to have jacked-up prices from Dining Services at $1.49.

And so the bookstore said that they would pull the Cokes instead of raising prices.  And there was a big outcry, and there was letters to the editor.  And myself and some other people put some pressure on.  And hallelujah, the bureaucracy’s response was, “We’re going to leave the Cokes in for now because of this great wave of outrage that came from all these students.  And we’re going to have a committee to study that.”

Now, I wrote a letter into the — online, and I said, “Guys, I will save you the money and the time and the resources and the meetings, and all the effort that’s going to go in, and the studies and the projections that you guys are going to do.  And I’ll boil it all down for you.  Students — we’re a little bit on the poor side when we’re in college.  And your study’s going to show that we want the $0.99 Cokes.”

I’m just giving you some kind of funny examples.  I just have kind of my perspective of being the State Chairman of Utah College Republicans, and kind of traveling around.  And those kind of funny things happen.  But really, if you want to stand up, at Utah State, we were able to bring David Horowitz in.  And they formed a committee to study that issue as well.  And then we invited him to the speech when he was the keynote speaker at our State Republican Convention.  And we invited that committee of faculty and students that had been formed to study the academic freedom issue and this David Horowitz guy.  None of them showed up to hear him speak.  I guess they were at another committee meeting; I’m not sure.

But the point being is I just want to leave everybody with the principle that college is a fun time; you can get engaged.  It’s fun to work with organizations with Young Americas Foundation, LI, College Republicans, Students for Academic Freedom; bringing the conservative message to your college campus.  Because in the end, if you’re willing to show up, you’re willing to put in the effort, you’re going to get stuff done, you’re going to move the ball forward.  And together, we’ll be a stronger conservative movement.

Thank you.

Gib Armstrong: Wow. $23,000 to $500.  There’s a level playing field.

Our next speaker is Todd Taylor.  Todd is the President of the Penn State College Republicans.  And we got a lot of College Republicans up here.  Where are the College Democrats?  Don’t they care about free speech?

But Todd is President of the Penn State College Republicans.  And Penn State is the one campus in Pennsylvania where we’ve made the most significant progress.  And Todd, thank you for being with us.  Look forward to hearing your remarks.

Todd Taylor: Penn State.

First of all, I want to say — again, it’s an honor to be here.  And we have to recognize two people — David Horowitz and Mr. Gibson Armstrong, for their hard work that they have done through all of this.  Round of applause [for both] [inaudible].  They’ve been thanked enough, but we’re thanking you again.

One of the most memorable moments I have from being at the Penn State College Republicans was during the Michael Moore protest of 2004, where some wacko-crazy liberal came up to me.  And he said, “You’re a no-good, lying Bushie.”  And, I mean, first I said, “What the heck does that even mean?”  And then I said to him, “Well, you’re a no-good, lying Kerry.”  So — I mean, it’s — it’s really like, what is the way we talk to each other anymore between Democrats and Republicans?  So that was one of the most memorable moments I had.

Being from the great state of Pennsylvania, I can appreciate that my state has been at the forefront, and is the epicenter for a lot of political battles in, in fact, the country.  We have seen the rise of such conservative icons such as Senator Rick Santorum.  And we miss him greatly in the state of Pennsylvania.  And we maybe can also say that our new senator, Bobby Casey, may be the conservative senator from the state of Pennsylvania.

Now Pennsylvania has become a scene of another intense battle.  And that battle is student academic freedom rights.  And again, Mr. Armstrong has done so much in that topic.

As students, we must yearn for an academic space that is fair and balanced — it’s like Fox News — in which both sets of ideas — not just conservative, not just liberal, but both sets of ideas — can be expressed upon in an individual manner.

Now being from Penn State, one may think that since, you know, it’s a pretty conservative area, that maybe the school is conservative.  I thought wrong.  We held — the Penn State College Republicans held an unbelievable 9/11 event.  And you would think that the administration would even help us raise the flag.  They were not cooperative in that.  And they charged us.  And then they had the audacity and the temerity to say two weeks later, in a formal letter, that we were too loud during our 9/11 event.  Well, this is the most heinous event in American history.  And I’m not going to be quiet, and neither should you.

And isn’t it odd that, as our Penn State undergraduate government passed a Student Academic Bill of Rights, that that organization was forced to dissolve only about a year and a half later.  Unbelievable.  So we can see where political allegiances lie.

What can we do?  One of the two things that I say we can do — we have to combat apathy.  That is really key for me.  There has been, I think — the idea with most students is that they’re going to have this professor for say four months, five months, and then they’re going to be done with it.  But then that professor is free to hurt other students — continual basis.  So we have to act up.

And also another thing you can do — join your local College Republicans.  It’s unbelievable what this organization can do; it’s a great organization.  And I have met so many unbelievable partnerships and friends in this organization.  And, just join.

So in conclusion, I mean, what I would just really like to say — you know, we’re students here — I would say, do not waiver.  Students do not yield.  Students do not relent.  Do not stop.  We are college students, and we are not going to surrender in this fight.

Thank you very much.

Gib Armstrong: Well said.  And you know, I thought Penn State was a moderate university as well, until I was on the Appropriations hearing and got to interact with their president, which was very interesting.

Our last speaker this morning on the panel is Nate Walton from Bates University.  I’ve heard Nate before.  And he does a tremendous job about talking about some of the things that they’ve done in Maine.  So Nate, thanks for being with us this morning.

Nate Walton: Thank you, Gib.  And thank you, Students for Academic Freedom.

I want to start today by reemphasizing what some of the other panelists have said about the importance of the fight for academic freedom.  It’s more about a balanced campus.  It’s more about intellectual plurality; the diversity of ideas.  But most importantly, it’s about the solvency, the intellectual solvency, of the next generation.

Like Paul Gourley and others said, there’s apathy among young people.  And if young people don’t stand up for the college campus that their parents are paying for, that they deserve to have, what kind of next generation are we going to have; not only on our campuses but in the business world and in the political world?

Certainly, the events of September 11th, and what Steve Miller has done to honor those on campuses across the country, show that young people are patriotic, conservative values appeal to them; and that they want the freedom on their campus that they deserve.

I want to talk a little bit today about the Students for Academic Freedom effort that we’ve led in Maine on a statewide level, which has been very successful.  And I want to start off, as the other panelists have, by thanking David Horowitz.  Because without him and Students for Academic Freedom, this effort would not be possible.  We would not have the resources, the inspiration or the guidance that we would need to be able to fight this effort and to fight this important battle on our campuses.

Like Paul Gourley said, the College Republicans is a terrific organization in which to battle for academic freedom on our campuses.  In Maine we’ve had a great deal of success with this effort.  It began a little over two years ago, when 13 college students showed up at the Maine Statehouse to testify for an Academic Bill of Rights.  They went into a committee hearing for the Education and Cultural Committee.  A state legislator had sponsored the bill; had heard about Students for Academic Freedom, which was by then just starting; and realized — himself a teacher — that this effort was paramount and important.

But most interesting thing for me at that hearing was the folks on the other side, opposing the Academic Bill of Rights — the Maine Education Association, the ACLU, the Teachers Union, the Provos for the University of Maine system, and a number of assorted professors.  The rudeness that they showed, the contempt and attitude that they showed towards the students — who testified for eight hours about being called ignorant by the professors, about being ridiculed by their classmates, about being disproportionately funded by the student government was really appalling, and showed the battle that this really is; and that the interests, the entrenched interests, that are on the other side of this academic freedom battle.

What the Maine College Republicans have focused on, on our effort in Maine, is combining what we’ve done as College Republicans — which is fighting on campaigns to help elect Republicans — to also lead the fight for academic freedom, like Paul Gourley mentioned was so important.

We’ve done this through a variety of ways — first of all, by bringing speakers to campus — was how we started doing it.  We brought great speakers like David Horowitz, Judge Kenneth Starr, Bill Crystal of the Weekly Standard, among many others.

The second effort is through the Academic Bill of Rights.  The Academic Bill of Rights, as I’m sure many of you know, is a document that encourages intellectual pluralism and academic diversity, which has been a fantastic tool to raise debate about academic freedom on campus, and also to create a grievance method, which is the most important thing lacking on our campuses, for students to be able to express their opinions freely, and know that if they are unfairly treated, they will have a mechanism by which to seek grievance.

The Academic Bill of Rights, as I said, was introduced in the Maine legislature.  And it failed by a party-line vote.  What a surprise.  As a result, we use our success in gaining media and attention for introducing the Academic Bill of Rights in student — sorry — the Maine State legislature, which create a great deal of media attention.  Thank you.

We use the success of that effort to propose the Academic Bill of Rights in student governments across the state.  It passed unanimously at Bates College, without my mentioning its sponsor’s name.  And as soon as they found out its sponsor’s name and the organization behind it, they led an effort to repeal it.  They call me someone who tried to usurp the democratic effort, even though I’d managed a unanimous passage of the document.  And I was able to very successfully — after reading Robert [Schul’s] order for a number of hours — thwart that effort.