Baylor has reached a missional crisis—a “turning point,” if you will. Baylor students and administration need to decide what the purpose of a university is, and the place politics has in pursuing that purpose. If we don’t choose our answers to those questions, Baylor will drift, unintentionally but inevitably, into an answer none of us would have chosen.
I believe that the purpose of a Christian university is to seek the truth rigorously, through research and socratic discussion, and to foster Christian virtue in its students. By and large, the TPUSA event (and the “alternative” event it inspired) didn’t help advance that purpose, and because of that, I believe that Baylor shouldn’t have allowed it on campus.
I didn’t go into the event expecting to come to that conclusion, but after reflecting on my experience, I truly believe it. It’s not because I’m a “psychotic, castrated lib,” as right-wing political commentator Benny Johnson called members of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). It’s not just because I think it’s wrong for Johnson to respond to a student who farmed cows and pigs by commenting that he’d be “very familiar with how to deal with liberal women.” It’s that the people being insulted and argued against didn’t have a chance to defend themselves to the 438 people who attended. That is contrary to the spirit of the university.
A university should encourage students to engage with topics, even political ones, in the spirit of an academic, not a politician. This seems obvious to me. Because of the nature of elections, political figures have a vested interest in engaging with ideas and policy in a way that makes their side seem better than it is, and the other side to seem worse than it is. As citizens of a classically liberal democratic republic, it’s something we have to deal with. However, bringing that spirit to a university isn’t wise, and Baylor, on paper, recognizes this.
A university should encourage students to engage with topics, even political ones, in the spirit of an academic, not a politician.
According to the Baylor Student Organization speaker event policies, “particular concern should be taken that the University not be politicized.” Both the TPUSA event and the counter event were political, but they also fostered politicization. There’s a distinction. Voting is political, listening to primary debates is political, running for a Student Government position is political.
Politicization, on the other hand, creates “omnicauses,” wherein people are bound to hold the party’s views on disparate issues, and where to disagree with one issue is to deny the entire omnicause. Both the left and the right are guilty of creating omnicauses. Each omnicause entails a specific opinion on hot-button, controversial topics, and there are social consequences if an individual in the cause decides to change their mind. Meaning, this grouping of causes can lead people, especially students, to engage issues as “America-First Republicans,” or as “LGBTQ+ advocates,” rather than as truth-seekers.
Johnson was not afraid to lump people into political categories. He spent time during the event on several conservative “wins,” including congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s fraud charges, Virginia’s redistricting being blocked by a judge, and the federal indictment of the SPLC for funding extremist groups. I would guess that most liberals aren’t even familiar with the SPLC. But Johnson’s (potentially satirical) advice was to say to a liberal who may approach a future TPUSA tabling event, “what’s it like funding the KKK, biatch?”
To his credit, the president of Baylor’s TPUSA chapter, Peter Fernandez, gave a speech at the event in which he decried “[surrounding] ourselves with people who think exactly like us” and “[thinking] the other side is evil.” At the same time, he called the people at the counter event “opps” and said there’s probably only “tens or twenties of people there.”
Two notes before a final point on Baylor’s purpose as a university.
One, these are certainly not “unprecedented times,” but they are important ones. Back in 2019, the Baylor Young Americans for Freedom hosted Matt Walsh. A Change.org petition to cancel Walsh created by Baylor grad Patrick Hill II received 2373 signatures, but it failed, and Walsh was still able to speak. A counter event was also held, where Baylor’s left-leaning community used a party for recovering addicts, called the “Love Feast,” as a place for LGBTQ students to gather at the same time as Walsh’s event.
This time, the response to the event centered on countering the TPUSA event, rather than cancelling it. The new petition demanded “equal expression rights,” and contained a thorough written justification, unlike the 2019 petition:
To be clear, we don’t want to silence others; we want the same access they have. We recognize that no institution is neutral. However, by granting exclusive ‘unrestricted’ space to one political arm (TPUSA), Baylor has abandoned its role as a place of rigorous inquiry and has become a site of ideological indoctrination of a specific perspective of Christianity. We demand the same ‘unrestricted’ space for counter-narratives.
Here, the petitioners recognize that the solution to disagreement is not cancellation, something that I believe the attendees and speakers at the TPUSA event realize as well. This is an important step in the right direction in terms of national politics, but the issue of needing to bring in a counter-event could have been avoided, had the TPUSA event not been held on campus.
Two, about attendance—using the Lariat’s numbers, the All Are Neighbors event had 352 attendees, and TPUSA had 438, so a combined 790 people attended. Most of the attendees were students, although there were faculty, staff, and community members at both. Meaning, out of Baylor’s 19,858 students, a generous estimate would be that 4% attended. That is an incredibly low number. The reason these events matter is not because they will shape student viewpoints significantly right now, but because of what they represent for the direction of the school, politically and academically.
So, is it possible for Baylor to avoid politicization, while at the same time protecting free speech and academic freedom? Yes, if the university doesn’t make Wednesday’s events the new norm on campus.
President Livingstone’s email on the Thursday following the events mainly lauded that both events had been conducted safely, but she also wrote: “I want to thank each of you for engaging respectfully as a demonstration of Baylor’s Christian mission, our commitment to academic freedom and to civil discourse.” I didn’t see a clear representation of any of those three things at the TPUSA event. If Dr. Livingstone truly did, then she and I have very different conceptions of Christian mission, academic freedom, and civil discourse.
I believe that the closest the event came to any of these three ideals was during Johnson’s interview with Border Czar Tom Homan. I went into the event with low hopes for Homan. But, for the most part, he defended his actions and beliefs cogently and methodically. He referenced stats related to border security, his personal experience with children being taken across the border, and his habit of praying nightly for both border patrol agents and “aliens” crossing the border.
Homan is not an angel; he did call the Biden Administration “treasonous” for what he saw as purposeful mismanagement of the border. That’s a claim that really deserves a foil by someone who disagrees. Maybe a student would have asked a question on it, but there was not enough time to answer every question, or to discuss the questions that were asked in depth.
Of course, university regulation of politicization could be a slippery slope. If the university is the arbiter of what counts as politicization or not, doesn’t that severely restrict the academic freedom that I’m advocating for? No. It is not actually very hard to tell in most cases whether an event is intended to politicize. When it is difficult, the university should err on the side of allowing the event. It’s clear that the nationwide TPUSA tour is being held in order to rally young people around the MAGA cause, allowing for only minimal discussion (in the Q&A). It’s also clear that allowing political candidates like Ken Paxton to campaign on campus, as Baylor leadership has promised to allow, is intended to politicize students.
While I think this particular event should not have been allowed on campus, I am not condemning the existence of the Baylor TPUSA chapter itself. The chapter’s mission, according to its constitution, is admirable:
Turning Point USA at Baylor’s mission is to educate Baylor University students about the importance of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and capitalism through innovative campus activism and non-partisan, thought-provoking discussion.
It’s theoretically possible for Baylor’s TPUSA to stay true to this mission, even if it tends to attract right-wing students. Joining a TPUSA chapter doesn’t necessitate joining the right-wing omnicause. This same logic applies to all political student associations, even the College Democrats and Republicans. Their existence doesn’t necessitate undue politicization, but the holding of a rally, where students are explicitly asked to hold up posters of Charlie Kirk and begin chanting “USA,” does.
The mission of the university is primarily to be a place for students, even if free speech calls for apologists and ideologues to have a chance to air their opinions. By all means, students should hold and advocate for their individual beliefs. But we ought to do it not just respectfully, but respectably. We should allow opposition to be heard—not in another building across campus, but in the room in which they are being criticised. This may require some Liberals to grow a thicker skin in political conversation and some Conservatives to give views they see as “psychotic” a chance to be defended.
When Alexander Hamilton called on George Washington to break his treaty with France during the American revolution, he did so not on grounds that the French cause was altogether wrong, but that the way in which it was being sought was misguided. I would echo his words to TPUSA:
A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious. When conducted with magnanimity, justice, and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagances, it loses its respectability.
Liberals and Conservatives, be respectable, and by all means don’t stop talking. To fulfill its mission, Baylor needs students like you and I to be true students of politics and each other, something the TPUSA event didn’t foster.
