Students at Liberty University Required to Attend Bernie Sanders Speech
This seems a little strange but the speech is technically going to be a convocation which all Liberty students must attend.
Sarah Kaplan reports at the Washington Post.
Why Liberty University is requiring its students to attend a Bernie Sanders speech
It’s obvious why Sanders would want to speak at Liberty: He’s running for president. Speaking to large and sometimes skeptical audiences is what presidential candidates do. And Sanders, who’ll be speaking from the most left-leaning end of the political spectrum, probably has more trouble reaching audiences like Liberty’s than almost anyone else.
“It is very easy for a candidate to speak to people who hold the same views,” Sanders said Wednesday in comments relayed by a spokesman. “It’s harder but important to reach out to others who look at the world differently.”
What’s less clear is why Liberty, a school that has made its name as a pilgrimage site for the country’s top conservatives, would offer him their soapbox. These convocations aren’t just any old school assembly — they’re mandatory for all students who live on campus. That means at least 8,000 of Liberty’s students, most of them impressionable freshmen and sophomores, will be required to spend half an hour listening to a man much of whose platform the school has explicitly and implicitly condemned.
Why Liberty University is requiring its students to attend a Bernie Sanders speech (The Washington Post)
Comments
I can see Liberty requiring students to attend a Bernie speech. It’s a rare opportunity to hear the other side in all of it’s strange glory, especially for an LU student.
Well for Bernie this setting would give him another overwhelmingly white crowd where at least he will not be pushed off stage by #Blacklivesmatter protesters. Or anyone else. Maybe he will learn something…nah Socialists never learn. They wouldn’t be Socialists if they did.
It is important to understand the “enemy” of your values. To see them up close and personal. To hear them.
THEN, as I am going to guess, the students will be involved in a discussion of what they heard Sanders say in his speech, unlike liberal universities, where they’d be expected to just “accept” it…they can probably be critical of what Sanders says and come to their own conclusions.
Yeah…I like it. Bring ’em in. Tear ’em up. Discover their falsehoods and irrationalities.