First Amendment lawyer, WSU grad: They shouldn’t have canceled Ivanka Trump’s speech

Ask anyone who knows me. They will tell you I love Wichita State University. I am a proud 1996 graduate of the W. Frank Barton School of Business. My family and I have been basketball season ticket holders for almost 20 years. Some of our favorite memories are of attending Shocker basketball games.

So I was disappointed to learn that Wichita State canceled Ivanka Trump’s planned keynote graduation address because some students disagree with her views. I am a First Amendment attorney and the director of Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Academic Freedom. We defend the First Amendment rights of students and faculty at public universities so that everyone can freely participate in the marketplace of ideas.

Unfortunately, most public universities today are no longer marketplaces of ideas where students can pursue truth. Instead, they have become an assembly line for one type of thought, molding students to receive a prefabricated set of acceptable views rather than equipping them to engage new ideas independently on their own terms.

Wichita State has a long tradition and history of producing successful entrepreneurs. A successful entrepreneur must be a forward thinker. In other words, a successful entrepreneur must be able to recognize a need and then create a new product or service to satisfy that need. To recognize a need, you must be able to understand the world as it is — not as you wish it to be.

Historically, virtually everyone in the Western world agreed that the highest purpose of the university is to apprehend truth. To apprehend truth is to understand the world as it is.

Recently, that purpose has come under attack. Many administrators, faculty, and students believe that truth, especially moral truth, cannot be apprehended and should no longer be pursued. Abandoning the pursuit of truth, they now argue that a university’s purpose is not to understand the world, but to change the world. And they seek to do that through an inaccurate vision of social justice that is driven by politics and power rather than charity and truth. But these two approaches are mutually exclusive. A university must choose one or the other. I hope that Wichita State chooses the latter.

True social justice pursues truth with a spirit of charity. It seeks to ensure equal treatment of all individuals while still recognizing our many differences. Differences of opinion foster growth and understanding. They should be celebrated, not rejected — especially in a university setting, where the mission is to pursue truth because truth is inseparable from justice.

This pursuit of social justice over truth is stifling important philosophical discourse, scientific research, and cultural debates on many critical societal issues because of calls for censure of academics who espouse positions that are unpopular or politically inconvenient. In response, 12 leading scholars recently published a statement in Inside Higher Ed denouncing this censorship: “Philosophers who engage in this debate should wish for it to be pursued through rational dialogue, and should refuse to accept narrow constraints on the range of views receiving serious consideration.”

Today’s college students will be tomorrow’s leaders. I encourage Wichita State to continue its history of forward thinking by promoting First Amendment values rather than teaching students that it is acceptable for the government to censor unpopular views.

For a public university to show this type of vision and courage, that would be a Shocker.

This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 10:33 AM.