As a graduating senior, I have had a long time to look at the mechanisms that make up the social and political atmosphere of Southern Adventist University. In the three years since I transferred in from Southwestern, I have noticed that our priorities affect diversity of thought on our campus. This effect, unfortunately, has led to a restriction of thought on campus, especially for libertarians and Republicans.
With that in mind, I’m going to give a bit of a bold statement. We don’t have a lot of libertarians or political conservatives that come on campus and do convocations. We’ve had a lot of political liberals and religiously conservative people on campus to do speeches, but we really do not delve into topics that would interest centrists, libertarians and Republicans on campus. If we want to be a campus that actually embraces diversity, we cannot simply be focused on superficial diversity. We need to focus on political diversity as well.
Our campus does not do very well when it comes to this. We very often go the path of the standard public university and give progressive speakers the limelight while holding back non-progressive individuals. This squelches the diversity that our campus claims to champion. I have noticed that we bring in speakers who tell the majority of students exactly what they want to hear. To me, that’s not diversity. That’s indoctrination.
As far as superficial diversity is concerned, our campus falls short in a number of areas, namely compartmentalization. Our student body enjoys putting people of different ethnicities, genders and interests in small social boxes and then saying, “Stay here.” We have participated in self-segregation and created a clique atmosphere that is extremely toxic. I submit to you that we do not need social clubs and cliques. At our age, we should be able to locate friends even outside of our own interests, ethnicities or genders.
To reiterate, if we want to be a truly diverse campus, then we have to encourage an idea of freedom of thought, not an idea that offending someone with an opinion is terrible. We have to be willing to accept that we all have differing opinions and everyone is entitled to them, including those of us who are libertarians and Republicans. As a libertarian, I try and do my best to defend the freedom of humanity. Humans should be free to express their opinions and have them tested by other people in a civil, respectful manner, whether they be progressive or not. We need a campus where all opinions are welcome, even those that do not conform to the ideas that utopian progressivism espouses.