Culture
Posted by Charlie Kirk Staff - 2.07.23

Arizona State Univ. Faculty Petition to Bar Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, From Campus Event

Arizona State Univ. Faculty Petition to Bar Charlie Kirk, Dennis Prager, From Campus Event

Culture
Posted by Charlie Kirk Staff - 2.07.23

Faculty members from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University are petitioning to have Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and PragerU founder Dennis Prager barred from an event on campus.

The members have written a letter to the honors college dean to express their anger at the college for having allowed Kirk and Prager to hold and attend the event, the Post Millennial reported.

“We, the undersigned Barrett faculty, write to condemn the ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness‘ event the TW Lewis Center for Personal Development is scheduled to host on February 8th, 2023, and to express a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the Lewis Center,” the letter stated.

According to Turning Point USA, the event will take place at ASU’s Gammage Auditorium and features personal financial coach Robert Kiyosaki as well as Kirk and Prager.

“We do not take this position lightly, as all of us believe Barrett should be a place where our students encounter a broad diversity of voices and viewpoints,” the letter to Barrett Honors College Dean Tara Williams continued. The faculty letter adds that “this event marks the culmination of a long history of choices made by the leadership of the Lewis Center, the sum of which demonstrate a vision for the center that runs contrary to the core values of the Barrett community.”

The letter goes on to say that while the Barrett faculty “applaud” the work of colleagues in developing the Lewis Center’s academic curriculum, “(often in spite of the Lewis Center leadership’s efforts to curtail their academic freedom)…our concerns about the intellectual value of Lewis Center’s public programming are long standing.”

The letter states that they are concerned about “Kiyosaki, whose key claims in his bestselling book have been widely debunked and whose public speaking engagements on wealth generation have been exposed as sales schemes, at the 2/8 event are in this vein.”

Regarding Kirk and Prager, the faculty letter said that “our objections to two of the scheduled speakers at the ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ event, however, exceed those previous worries by an order of magnitude.” The letter falsely claims that Prager and Kirk “are purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, as well as the institutions of democracy, including our public institutions of higher education.”

The letter then attempted to provide an overview of Prager and Kirk’s “most recent bigoted and anti-democratic public positions.”

“These people create an echo chamber of media articles that agree with their wokeness and then use those as evidence for canceling an event. And they have the gall to claim they are stewards of open dialogue by attempting to block speakers who publicly disagree with them,” Kiyosaki said in response.

The examples cited in the letter include Kirk’s book “The College Scam,” adding that these speakers “regularly employ anti-trans slurs on air and have suggested that gay people are incapable of thinking ‘as a person.'”

Additionally, the faculty also falsely claimed that Kirk and Prager are “white nationalists.”

“What kind of impression does it [give] our BIPOC students and potential students to see that during Black History Month Barrett is hosting two white nationalist provocateurs who have decried the social prohibition on using the n-word and called for the cancellation of Black History Month?” it said.

According to PragerU, as of February 2, 37 out of 47 Barrett Honors College faculty have signed the petition letter.

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