A well known lawyer and journalist visited OU this week to speak about the need for a substantive and free exchange of differing political viewpoints in the United States.
David French, staff writer for National Review, gave a lecture entitled Conservatives Need Not Apply at 6 p.m. March 1 in Meacham Auditorium in the Oklahoma Memorial Union. French focused on the importance of free sharing of ideas, and said there is a major issue of bias at universities, whose faculty members in social sciences and humanities often lean too far to the left.
French: Those who think like-mindedly are more committed, more extreme in their positions when speaking about their positions to each other.
— Andrew Clark (@Clarky_Tweets) March 2, 2017
French said in his time as a Harvard Law student, he felt no point of view was suppressed in his classes, and he could not wait to go to class and hear the variety of views and perspectives that made up the university.
French: When you spend too much time with people who think like you, you lose the ability to see how the other side thinks.
— Andrew Clark (@Clarky_Tweets) March 2, 2017
Later in the lecture, French touched on how the results of the most recent presidential election were a surprise to so many, but that there were faults in both major parties.
French: Trump was certainly offensive many times, but the Left failed to engage his surrogates intellectually to counter those viewpoints.
— Jessie C. Smith (@LongGoneJess) March 2, 2017
When asked by an audience member if he is still loyal to his political party, French said, “I love conservatism. I love those values. My loyalty to a party is dependent on its reliance to those conservative values.”
In closing, French openly wondered if there would ever come a time again where people’s beliefs and sensitivities would not be used as points of division, but instead as topics of discussion.
“At this point, we’re getting to where we dislike what the other says so much, we don’t even want to be around each other,” French said.
