CHAPEL HILL — Despite the rude reception given former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and other conservative speakers at UNC-Chapel Hill recently, there are indications that the effort to get conservative voices on campus is making progress.
One liberal student even complained in a local paper recently that the star power of conservative speakers now outshines liberal speakers.
Leftist and liberal students on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus have kept up their tradition of heckling, disrupting, and walking out of speeches given by conservatives, most recently when Ashcroft appeared on campus last month.
In The Chapel Hill Herald on Sept. 9, Tom Jensen, a 2006 graduate of UNC-CH and a former liberal student activist, said: “During the past four years, there has been no comparable roster of speakers from the left side of the spectrum.” While conservative speakers during that time have included Ann Coulter, Ben Stein, Alan Keyes, David Limbaugh, and John Stossel, Jensen said that the only high-profile liberals to come to campus were Paul Begala and Paul Krugman.
“Liberal groups can get student fee money just as the conservative ones do,” Jensen wrote. “But raising that extra $10,000 to $25,000 to cover the rest of the costs of bringing a speaker usually has proven to be too high of a hill to climb.”
John Ashcroft’s $25,000 honorarium, for example, was paid for by $10,000 in student fees and outside donations from groups such as Young America’s Foundation.
Luke Farley, a conservative student and the speaker of the UNC-CH Student Congress, said that while more conservatives may be appearing on campus by invitation from conservative groups, the administration, when it invites speakers, does not attempt ideological balance. “Whenever there is an official event and the university gets involved, the speaker is usually liberal,” Farley said.
As for the ability to get more outside funding for conservative speakers, Farley says he thinks he know why. “That’s because our ideas are better,” he said. “They allow people to prosper. Those people in turn have money to donate to conservative causes.”
But when it comes to getting student fee funds, Farley said that conservatives have a difficult time. “Being speaker, I have seen that conservative speaker requests get more scrutiny, especially the pro-life group,” Farley said.
Ashcroft’s Sept. 12 appearance was part of a continuing effort by campus conservatives to bring political balance to UNC-CH. The Committee for a Better Carolina and the Federalist Society, two conservative student organizations, sponsored his appearance. About 1,000 came to hear him speak.
His speech was interrupted several times in Memorial Hall by hecklers who shouted slogans and questions during his talk. In the middle of the speech, about 50 students walked out of the auditorium together.
Before and after the speech, protesters stood outside Memorial Hall and held signs with slogans such as, “Stop this racist war now” and “Aschroft stop your terrorizing.”
The former attorney general was the most recent in a string of high-profile conservative speakers to come to campus in recent years. But the reception Ashcroft received was a clear indication that some students at UNC-CH are far from making a shift to the political right.
In 2001 about 150 students walked out during a speech by author David Horowitz. In 2003 controversy arose over the use of student fees to fund a speech by Coulter.
In 2005 a woman threw a pie at speaker Patrick Guerriero, president of the Log Cabin Republicans. She then pulled the fire alarm where the event was being conducted.
Ashcroft stressed the importance of the United States preventing terrorist attacks rather than responding to them. He said, “Security exists only to guard liberty.”
Referring to the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks as “individuals who resented our freedom and what it means,” Ashcroft was interrupted when someone shouted, “the Bush administration you mean?” While Ashcroft touted the freedoms protected in the Constitution, another attendee shouted, “Then why do you disregard them?”
Shaddi Hasan, a freshman who attended the event, said in a letter to the editor Sept. 14 in The Daily Tar Heel, “Like most people I have met on this campus, John Ashcroft is not exactly my hero,” Hasan writes. “Yet when I went to hear him speak on Tuesday night, I would have been embarrassed to associate myself with many of those in opposition to him.”