If the university you send your kid to in order to get a quality post secondary education has a president who believes a stone can be a butterfly, or that a toothbrush can be Bigfoot or that a man can be a woman, do you really want to trust that university with your impressionable young nube’s academic development?
That’s the question a lot of tuition-paying parents and students are asking after the president of Topeka’s Washburn University, Dr. Jerry Farley, attacked a conservative speaker that Farley himself gave permission to present at the University recently.
More concerning than the expected dust-up regarding Farley’s paranoid wokeness in attacking Daily Wire personality Michael Knowles and the conservative students who planned and attended the “Banning Transgenderism” event is that Farley himself violated the university’s inclusion policy in his attack on his own conservative students.
The whole shebang (or hebang) of course got rolling amid the context of the male collegiate swimmer at Penn State who, after several years competing as a man, was allowed to compete as a female and of course blew the girls out of the water this past season, winning any number of meet titles and eventually an NCAA event championship – all of which rightfully should have gone to actual women.
Knowles and other conservatives at The Daily Wire news service have vehemently protested the undeniable unfairness of this situation, and without contempt or hatefulness toward gender dysphoric individuals, have flatly stated the uncompromised categorical scientific fact that men cannot be women, and vice-versa. They’ve also vehemently opposed the promotion of trans culture to children, the drugging and mutilation of children in those pursuits and the deference demanded for trans culture by Liberals in the American political arena.
After signing a contract with Knowles to allow him to speak at the university as a guest of the college’s Young Republicans chapter, Dr. Farley took the opportunity to eviscerate both Knowles and the campus’ conservative students, claiming at the same time to be a stalwart defender of free speech but then covering his behind with the Liberal Elite by maligning conservatives.
“While I am strongly in the support of first amendment rights, I am disappointed when those rights are used to make others feel unwelcome and even unsafe in our community,” Dr. Farley wrote. “While we support the right to speak freely, Washburn University does not condone the hate and misinformation spread by the speaker and his supporters.”
Knowles invited Farley to join him at the podium to address issues of his “hate and misinformation” and how they applied both to himself and the students who invited him. Farley did not appear.
But in maligning his own conservative students, Farley violated the “inclusion” paragraph of Washburn’s Core Values, which is a part of the university’s mission statement.
“Inclusion: cultivating an inclusive learning, living and working community, facilitating the success of all people, and supporting all individuals.”
Attacking students as hateful and accusing them of spreading misinformation – when that information is scientific fact – doesn’t seem like “supporting” them.
How interesting that the president of Washburn University views debate and apparently any opinion that differs from the university elite as “hate and misinformation,” especially about a topic that can be so easily resolved by reading one of his own science department’s textbooks. But in a modern America so culturally cockeyed that a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court can’t tell a U.S. Senate panel what a woman is – when that nominee is herself in fact a woman – nothing seems surprising. Washburn College Republican Chairwoman Claudia Fury – a student mind you – perhaps summed it up best in her introduction of Knowles:
“Universities around the country present a common theme of wanting everyone to look different, but think the same,” Fury said. “They’re wanting to tell you what to think, and not how to think. They’re willing to sacrifice the truth to keep people from being possibly offended.”
It should give Kansas pride that some of its college students understand and appreciate truth even if their leaders like Washburn University President Jerry Farley do not.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.