More on the UT Orientation Leader Incident
More on the table leg weapon story from yesterday from my column with the Texas Insider:
“An orientation leader stretched out his arm, clutching the severed leg of a table, to create a physical barrier from the four of us and the steady stream of students. We were perceived as a physical threat because we wished to offer an alternate conservative viewpoint to the new students of our University,” explained Becker.
During my time as a campus activist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, I saw my fair share of strange behaviors on campus from the left, but the university and its staff always believed in the right to free speech, no matter what students believed. In fact the orientation leaders asserted to the YCT chapter that they were passing flyers out in vain because no student would really want to read the conservative side of things.
“The point we would like to make, and that every proponent of free speech would agree on, is that the particular message or effectiveness of the speech does not matter, it is the speech itself which is intrinsically protected under the Constitution,” said Becker.
The orientation leaders owe an apology not just to YCT, but also to the UT Austin student body, for hypocritically trampling on free speech rights. Worst of all, this was at a diversity training event.