In the wake of a controversial column about sexual assault on campuses, Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist George Will was uninvited from speaking at Scripps College's program to promote conservative views at the women's school.
"It was in the works and then it wasn’t in the works," Will told the
Claremont Independent.
"They didn’t say that the column was the reason, but it was the reason."
The syndicated columnist was supposed to speak at the ninth annual Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program, which aims to bring speakers to campus whose political views differ from the majority of students at the college.
Will told the newspaper Christopher DeMuth, former president of conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, resigned from his position on the program’s speaker selection committee because of the revocation.
Previous speakers invited to campus by the program include conservative columnists Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan.
One student said the cancellation only shows the lack of political diversity at Scripps.
"If Scripps claims to want 'to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently,' as our founder explained, it should not keep contributing to a culture of exclusion and silence," student Libby Ramsey told the newspaper.
Will came under fire for
a controversial column focused on the issue of sexual assault on college campuses and the government’s intervention into how colleges should respond.
"[Colleges and universities] are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous ('micro-aggressions,' often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate," Will wrote.
"And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle."
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch dropped Will's column from their op-ed page, and four Democratic members of the U.S. Senate
signed a letter denouncing the column.
Will responded to the lawmakers with a letter of his own,
The Washington Post reported, writing, "I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of that crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes."
Town Hall called the cancellation an example of how "the liberal bias on college campuses continues."
"It is shameful that a program designed to educate students about differing opinions seeks to shut out opinions it doesn’t agree with," it wrote.
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