EDITORIAL: Rutgers' values may be clashing
Turning Point USA event may set good precedent
Anyone who attends Rutgers knows that as a community, we value acceptance and inclusivity very highly — we want to protect our fellow students from hate and prejudice. At the same time, being that we are a major public research institution, another one of our fundamental values is based in academic freedom and the spread of ideas. But in recent times, it seems those two values seemingly tend to clash.
On Monday, an event hosted by the Rutgers Conservative Union brought Turning Point USA founder and leader Charlie Kirk and conservative activist Candace Owens to Rutgers. Turning Point USA’s stated mission is to identify, educate, train and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government. Kirk has been called a conservative provocateur, and both him and Owens say they are “culture warriors” trying “to save Western civilization” from liberals. Kirk is known to have the ear of President Donald J. Trump, and spent a sizable amount of time campaigning with him. So, it is safe to say that these two are controversial and protestable.
Interestingly, the duo was met with no protest at their event. Granted, they were hosted by an individual organization on campus and not the University itself, but in more recent years it has not been uncommon for controversial speakers brought by individual organizations to be protested at colleges. Back in 2016, Milo Yiannopoulos, a former senior editor for Breitbart News, was invited to campus by the Rutgers chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. Though similarly controversial, Yiannopoulos, unlike Kirk and Owens, was met with significant opposition. Shouting matches and chants disrupted much of the event, as many students felt that Yiannopoulos stood for hate.
But although Kirk and Owens do disseminate controversial, provocative and outright disagreeable viewpoints much like Yiannopoulos, it is refreshing to hear to that they were able to speak their piece. In the true spirit of an academic institution, students the other night were able to challenge the duo’s perspectives with difficult questions and deliberation.
How can we maintain civil discourse at Rutgers down the road in the face of ideas brought to campus that some members of the community find preposterous and even dangerous? An argument made by opposers of Lisa Daftari coming to campus was that her controversial ideas could potentially work to incite violence against Muslims at Rutgers. Of course, if that were true of any speaker’s ideologies, they should not be brought here. But it is no doubt hard to be sure where the line gets drawn between ideas that are acceptable and ideas that are not.
In an interview with The Daily Targum after the Yiannopoulos event, one Rutgers student said, “(Rutgers groups) should not be inviting anyone like (Yiannopoulos) because what we stand for is inclusion and diversity … If a speaker makes someone feel unsafe or uncomfortable, then they should not come to campus.” This statement does well to exemplify the idea that two of Rutgers’ fundamental values, combating hate and prejudice and promoting intellectual diversity, tend to contradict one another at times.
In the marketplace of ideas, people are bound to encounter sentiments that they find intolerable. Comfort zones will be challenged, and people will hear things that disgust them. But that is arguably the nature of free discourse and deliberation — something that is imperative in a democratic society. Monday’s event will hopefully set a precedent here in New Brunswick that, down the road, will allow us to more fully understand the proper way to respond to controversial and provocative speech.
The Daily Targum's editorials represent the views of the majority of the 150th editorial board. Columns, cartoons and letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Targum Publishing Company or its staff.
