Hearing Mike Pence Speak Won't Harm UVA StudentsThe editorial board of UVA's The Cavalier Daily should abandon its effort to keep Mike Pence off campus.
By EMMA CAMP
3.24.2022
Former Vice President Mike Pence is set to speak at the University of Virginia on April 12, invited by the university's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. Normally, a former government official addressing interested students at a public college would be an unremarkable event. However, the editorial board of The Cavalier Daily—the student-run paper at UVA—has declared Pence's event to be a crisis. This week, the board published an editorial arguing that Pence's presence on campus will "threaten the lives" of UVA students, claiming that it amounts to "bigotry that threatens the well-being and safety of students on Grounds." Not only do they call on the university to not "platform" Pence due to his political beliefs—something that would be explicitly illegal because UVA is a public university—they also argue that those beliefs constitute a physical threat to the safety of UVA students.
As a former opinion writer for the paper and a current student at UVA, I am disappointed that a group of aspiring journalists would mount such an attack on free speech.
It is too easy to dismiss the editorial as simply the rumblings of college students, who often write unreasonable things and have outlandish opinions. I don't think my classmates' current views should follow them after graduation, nor should they be subject to an online pile-on because of them.
However, I do want to take them seriously. This is the latest incident in a troubling trend seeping its way into every corner of the public sphere: Labeling certain types of political speech as dangerous, even when the speaker doesn't incite violence. Not only is this a dull strategy, but it also destroys our ability to make meaningful statements about political problems.
The editorial board writes "For us, the answer is simple. Hateful rhetoric is violent — and this is impermissible." They insist that there is no space at UVA for "rhetoric that directly threatens the presence and lives of our community members. The LGBTQ+ individuals Pence has attacked, the Black lives he refuses to value and the successful stories of immigration he and the former president hope to prevent…"
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/03/24/hearing-mike-pence-speak-wont-harm-uva-students/
