Should a Community College website promote and support indirectly political programs not associated with the College and student education?
The Republican Women of Prescott invited radical right wing speaker Dinesh D’Souza to attend a political program at the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center that features Dinesh D’Souza on Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m. While the College has a right to rent to any political party, should it promote the political event on its web site and collect tickets for the showing? Common sense suggests it should not. In today’s political world, it should stay completely neutral. Furthermore, if it invites a radical right winger, then it should offer the same opportunity to a radical left winger.
According to Reuters, the right-wing media star who will speak at the Performing Arts Center “was sentenced [in September, 2014] to spend eight months in a community confinement center” as part of five years of probation for violating federal campaign finance laws. In January, 2014 D’Souza was indicted for arranging excessive campaign contributions to the Senate campaign of his friend, Wendy Long. After spending several months protesting the charges and claiming he was being unfairly targeted for his political beliefs, D’Souza pleaded guilty in May, 2014.
In a May, 2015 article, Evgenia Peretz writes that after D’Sousa made “wild arguments about race, he would make even wilder arguments about 9/11, in the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—whose title summed up its thesis. The real reason terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, he wrote, was anger stirred by the left—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood, Brokeback Mountain, and The Vagina Monologues.”
Peretz also wrote in the article that in a book D’Sousa titled, “In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010),” he wrote that President Obama “had a single goal: to avenge the injustices inflicted by colonialism upon his father’s Kenyan homeland, by intentionally weakening America’s economy and power in the world. The book was written in two months, he boasted in the introduction. And with sentences like these, it showed: “The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into a stupor, and bounced around on two iron legs … raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated, African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” The conservative Weekly Standard called the book “lunacy.” You may read the entire Vanity Fair article by clicking here.
The following shows how the College website is being used for this program. One would think that the Administration would exercise better judgment.
