State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, continued to emphasize the need for the UW System to bring more conservative speakers to its campuses in an interview on WISN Sunday.
Vos says he has gotten some pushback from liberals, but thinks there is an overall consensus on the issue.
“I think by and large most people recognize that we have a problem in higher education with trying to foster ideas on both sides of the aisle,” Vos said in the interview.
Vos argued that exclusively featuring liberal speakers on campus, as well as the idea of “microaggressions,” will hurt students long-term.
“I want to live in a world where people have the right to say what they think and be called out by people who are smarter than them or more articulate,” Vos said to WISN. “And if you can’t have that in the university setting we are certainly setting our students up for failure in the long run.”
Speaking about funding for the university system, Vos said that there may be a potential link between bringing more conservative speakers to campus and an increase in funding.
“There is a great deal of support for higher education in our caucus, but we also want to make sure the money we are spending is spent wisely, and that it is spent on educating kids from all perspectives, not necessarily one ideological prism,” Vos said in the interview. “Showing that [the university] understands that all perspectives are valuable would definitely reinforce what I want to hear as a legislator.”
Vos’s comments on Sunday follow an op-ed he released Sept. 6 titled “A Free Speech Challenge to the UW System.” Published by Right Wisconsin, the op-ed said the university system needed to do a better job promoting ideological diversity and said the 50 top-paid speakers included only “a handful of conservatives.”
