If Wednesday’s spectacle of dueling political events at Baylor University proves anything, it’s that the airing of conflicting viewpoints is still possible at private institutions of higher learning, even as Republican state officials seek to restrict such options and employ “cancel culture” on state-run campuses across Texas. It’s also evidence that resistance to Trump administration efforts to crush the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion in America remains alive and well, at least among up-and-coming generations.
So let’s give credit where credit is due: Baylor correctly
allowed a coalition of student groups to hold an “All Are Neighbors”
counter-event on campus the same day Turning Point USA visits Baylor as part of
its spring college tour to “fight to save America and honor the legacy of
Charlie Kirk.” Speakers at the latter event include Trump Organization
executive vice president Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son; Trump
administration border czar Tom Homan; and right-wing pundit Benny Johnson. “All
Are Neighbors” reportedly features two prominent gay speakers.
Much of the student outcry over the Turning Point USA event
stems from lingering bad feelings over Baylor’s accepting, then rejecting, amid
earlier outcry from right-wing forces, a $643,401 grant from the Texas-based
Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation to fund research by Baylor’s School of Social
Work on how churches can better integrate not only women congregants but LGBTQ
individuals. It’s the sort of research increasingly under fire at
state-supported and even private universities and colleges during Trump 2.0.
The Baugh grant was made, the foundation said, to continue bolstering
the “Christian call to care for the marginalized.” Amid fallout over the grant
cancellation last summer, Baylor President Linda Livingstone explained that
“our concerns did not center on the research itself but, rather, on the
activities that followed as part of the grant. Specifically, the work extended
into advocacy for perspectives on human sexuality that are inconsistent with
Baylor’s institutional policies, including our Statement on Human Sexuality.”
This week's dueling campus events have aroused further outrage.
Baptist General Convention of Texas leadership announced Friday it will again “study”
its relationship with Baylor given what BGCT executive director Julio Guarneri
describes as the resolutely Christian research university's decision to host
speakers "who are Christian, identify as gay and practice LGBTQ+ advocacy
at a university-approved event." This, he charges, "is inconsistent
with the convention’s longstanding views on biblical sexuality.”
Yet the Turning Point USA college tour also has an Achilles’
heel. Founder Charlie Kirk spent much time in recent years visiting campuses nationwide,
debating students on his contention that costly college educations are a “scam.”
He even wrote a book about it, “The College Scam: How America's Universities
Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth.” Multiple
videos posted by Turning Point USA show Kirk confidently jousting with students
on his claim that their college tenures are “just a glorified credentialing
exercise.”
Underlying all of this is Kirk’s argument that “far-left
professors” seek to indoctrinate students with “anti-American ideas” – no surprise
given Turning Point USA’s mission to “build the most organized, active and
powerful conservative grassroots activist network on high school and college
campuses across the country.” College might be useful, Kirk conceded, if one is
learning “about the beauty of Western Civilization and reading the Federalist
Papers of Hamilton and Madison and Jay” and developing “a positive view of
America,” rather than, say, devoting time to the skepticism of postmodernist
thinkers.
“What does a manager of a Walmart Super Center make?” Kirk
asked a student in a Turning Point USA video recorded on an unidentified
college campus and posted in 2024. “Anybody know? It’s $400,000 a year. Yeah,
they don’t require – you guys should just go become a manager of a Walmart, it
doesn’t require a college degree. What does the average plumber make in
Scottsdale, Arizona? $115,000 a year. What does the average HVAC technician
make in Henderson, Nevada? $75,000 a year. But those don’t require college degrees.”
He predicted half of the students lined up to debate him
“will end up getting a job where your entire college debt burden means
nothing.”
Granted, there’s a certain entertainment in watching Kirk
spar with students still coming to grips with big, complex ideas in political
science, economics and the arts – students who may lack the insightful context
that comes with time and experience. One could also argue that Kirk dumbed down
his view of America: How can one gain a “positive view of America” without considering
generations of Americans who over 250 years suffered and struggled to overcome institutional
barriers blocking the aspirational Jeffersonian idea that “all men are created
equal”?
The epitome of Kirk's "college-is-a-scam" racket may
be the public figure he most championed. Although college-educated, the 45th
and 47th president has shown almost no knowledge of or appreciation for
federalism, rule of law, history, economics, foreign policy, Christian tenets
or Western philosophy. While displaying a framed copy of the Declaration of
Independence in the Oval Office last year, Trump was asked what it meant to
him: "Well, it means, uh, exactly what it says – it's a declaration, it's
a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot."
Immigrants citing any of those qualities on the new Trump
administration civics exam required for U.S. naturalization would flunk the
question, “Why is the Declaration of Independence important?”
Healthy intellectual counterpoint to Turning Point USA comes
from Waco native and Baylor class of ’03 alumna Skye Perryman. As Democracy
Forward president, she has led the D.C.-based legal organization in litigation,
investigation and public education contesting Trump administration efforts to
squelch dissent and override the rule of law. I can’t think of a better example
of its ongoing work than its efforts to ensure that people arrested by federal
immigration agents are nonetheless allowed prompt access to legal counsel.
During her March 24 “Americans in Exile, Democracy in
Crisis” lecture at Baylor, Perryman asked rhetorically if her alma mater wasn’t
allowing Turning Point USA on campus out of “fear of right-wing backlash if
Baylor builds a true marketplace of ideas where all are welcome to express
their views.” Perryman’s address, which advised courage in the face of such fear,
may well have contributed to Baylor’s allowing student clubs to hold the “All
Are Neighbors” counterpoint event to Turning Point USA’s nearby Trumpian campus
rally.
For me, Perryman’s more relevant insights came during Baylor
Homecoming 2025 when she lectured Baylor Interdisciplinary Core students on
occasion of the program’s 30th anniversary. In her lecture, “The
Academy on Trial: Democracy, Academic Freedom and the Examined Life,” she credits
BIC for much of her present-day idealism and activism in American politics. The
program, to quote a self-study concluded recently, seeks to “equip students
with the skills to engage in thoughtful intellectual inquiry and to discover
their place in a complex world through a community-oriented, interdisciplinary
curriculum.”
Provocative incentives to critical thought and civil debate are
not limited to pivotal figures in Western Civilization. One of Perryman’s
former professors, Lenore Wright, reminded all during the lecture that the
Baylor program was devised by fellow scholars such as philosophy professor Bob
Baird so that students such as Perryman “would struggle with Aeneas on his
journey, weep with Rama in exile, laugh with the irrepressible Monkey King as
he marked the farthest Column of the Universe and learn to embrace ‘the other’
across boundaries of time and culture.”
When I later asked Perryman, 43, what Baylor students were
to learn from these far-flung epics, I assumed it had to do with appreciation
of the global cultures that produced them. She instead cited their common theme:
“They’re about insurmountable barriers that people or gods
or whoever is in the telling – and in ‘The Aeneid,’ it’s humans and gods,
Juno in that work famously says, ‘If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell’ –
a lot of it is about what you do when things seem insurmountable. And, of
course, you have the gods at play. One of the lessons in the story is you don’t
know how it’s going to turn out, but the way you achieve the work you’re to do
as a human and, in a way, achieve immortality is to strive and have courage [amidst]
those odds.”
Perryman doesn’t view beneficiaries of the Baylor
Interdisciplinary Core program as limited to future political figures but
inclusive of all who function as virtual “community centers” in themselves – an
interesting notion: “Many are volunteering at schools, raising families,
creating community. There are [Baylor Interdisciplinary Core graduates] who are
doctors, who have advanced scientific research, who are tech executives,
journalists and national security leaders. Some have run and won elected
office. Others have published books.”
The point is that college can be the scam Kirk claimed
but need not be if students are not only getting “credentialed” for careers but
also busily fortifying themselves as curious, discerning, morally upright citizens.
I’m talking about citizens who, among other things, judge candidates on
character and policy viewed from all perspectives – but with a decided sense of
history and tradition. This pursuit requires more discernment than, say, voting
out of blind, destructive partisanship or the delusional idolatry that elevates
candidates to god-like status.
Given that the American Revolution is seen by many scholars
as the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment, Perryman reminded students that
not only are institutions of higher learning now on trial, so are democracy and
our country. She cited unauthorized destruction of the East Wing of the White
House by President Trump, on his own volition to build a massive ballroom, as a
metaphor for what has ensued across America through immigration deportations
and militarized cities.
“First, we have to remember who we are,” Perryman said. “We
stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us, who have enabled us as
a people to see further. In this nation, that means that we stand on the
shoulders of revolutionaries who threw off the reign of monarchy, who
questioned the divine rights of kings. The United States was the first nation
founded on a set of principles and ideals and promises that all people – all
people – were endowed by God with certain unalienable rights of life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.”
Professor Baird, whose columns on the Waco Tribune-Herald opinion
page are so positively instructive about great ideals, humanity and humility, says
his reading list for students included Plato’s “The Apology” and John Stuart
Mill's “On Liberty” (especially chapters one and two) – both in their
own way about the risks democracy faces – and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of
Wrath,” whose poor white Okie migrant workers of the Great Depression face the
same hatred and contempt brown and black immigrants from other lands face today
in Trump’s America.
In my newspaper office, I kept on the wall a framed movie
poster of director John Ford’s 1940 film “The Grapes of Wrath” to remind me of
what a gruff old newspaperwoman, Katharyn Duff, once told me. A survivor of
rugged, dusty West Texas during the Great Depression, she offered advice that
was hardly original but no less relevant for one so young and naïve: Look after
the concerns of the struggling and the marginalized in your community; the
wealthy have plenty of resources and connections and hangers-on to draw upon
for themselves.
For Perryman, one timely piece worthy of study is civil
rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail,” especially relevant on our nation’s 250th anniversary. To
quote King’s epistle: “One day the South will know that when these disinherited
children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up
for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian
heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy
which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
One might argue neither “The Aeneid” nor “Ramayana,” nor
even “The Grapes of Wrath,” has anything to do directly with the Age of Trump.
But the cultivation of minds through interactive class analysis and critical
inquiry into literature, philosophy, history and political science must
necessarily invite comparisons with how things stack up now. Are we as a
society meeting foundational ideas and obligations? What’s most important is possessing
intellectually honest guideposts with which to deduce and decide all of this as
thoughtful, conscientious citizens.
One real challenge of today involves those who don’t or
can’t pursue enlightenment via college. Jefferson in his heyday was enthused
about the quality of everyday Americans; many proved ravenous in digesting newspapers,
notwithstanding their lack of formal education. Today marks a sharp break with
that tradition: Some cities in Texas lack a functioning newspaper and people
educated and uneducated are intellectually warped by what passes for “news” via
social-media balderdash and propaganda outlets masquerading as legitimate news operations.
Jefferson, who deemed authorship of the Declaration of
Independence and founding of the University of Virginia far greater
accomplishments than his presidency, knew the necessity of an informed public,
even in those who don’t pursue enlightenment through an institution of higher
learning. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of
civilization,” he wrote Virginia lawmaker Charles Yancey in 1816, “it expects
what never was and never will be."
Bill
Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas
journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor.
