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.


 
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