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‘This event did not happen easily,’ UPenn Adam Smith Society president says
PHILADELPHIA — A conservative club at the University of Pennsylvania hosted Ben Shapiro for a talk on Tuesday night after saying the university placed unnecessary restrictions on the event.
Colin Duffy, president of the UPenn Adam Smith Society chapter, told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the university had put up “roadblocks” in the process of scheduling the event.
Duffy and Sara Carr, vice president of the chapter, shared their struggle to get the event approved in a recent interview with The College Fix.
“We believe this is a great opportunity to practice engaging and civil discourse on Penn’s campus,” Carr said.
The chapter leaders began working with the university in August to plan the event, she said. However, she said administrators “imposed numerous restrictions on the event, including limitations on recording and livestreaming, public access, and the potential for open-ended security fees tied to anticipated protests.”
“During negotiations with the administration, we cited numerous precedent Penn events, including those featuring left-leaning speakers, that have allowed public access and/or recording,” Carr said.
When the students asked that standards be applied evenly, Carr said the administration did “[acknowledge] its inconsistencies in policy application” and agreed to allow the event to be recorded. However, “public access remains restricted,” she told The Fix.
The College Fix contacted the university media relations team by email multiple times over the past two weeks to ask for a comment on the situation, but they did not respond.
Shapiro speaks
The ticketed event, which the Adam Smith Society hosted in partnership with the Young America’s Foundation, was well attended Tuesday night.
Duffy touched on the barriers UPenn put up while introducing Shapiro.
“This event did not happen easily,” Duffy said.
“For months, our team went through bureaucratic delays, shifting requirements, and more roadblocks than should ever stand in the way of a student group trying to host a nationally acclaimed speaker on a college campus,” he said.
He continued, “At times, it felt like this event was being intentionally slow-walked by the Penn administration rather than supported, but our team stuck with it, because we believe this night was worth fighting for.”
“In times of growing disharmony among Americans, it is important now more than ever that people be willing to come together, hear views they may not agree with, and engage in serious, civil argument about the future of our country,” he said.
Duffy also praised the courage of everyone involved, including “those in this room tonight who may strongly disagree with Ben, but came anyway — not to shut the event down, not to shout it down, but to listen, to question, and to engage civilly.”
Shapiro opened by calling out fellow conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for their “low IQ,” “grievance-based” view of the world.
“What do all these purveyors of low IQ rubbish have in common? What they have in common is a grievance-based view of the world in which they, and those like them, are perennial victims of the American system, in which they have been betrayed by the very ideas and institutions that make America the greatest place in the world’s history,” Shapiro said.
“The attraction of low IQ ideology is envy, a belief that lack of success is somehow a reflection, not of bad decision making, or the hardships of life, but of a cruel system designed by a nefarious cadre of evil-doers.”
Shapiro continued, “High IQ conservatism rests on four fundamental foundations: free minds, free markets, public virtue, and a properly constructed government designed to protect these first three values.”
He urged young Americans to recognize the foundations created by their parents and grandparents and the inevitable collapse if society keeps chipping away at them.
“That requires us to understand that, sure, we have to make America great again, but we also have to understand what it was that made America great in the first place,” he said. “When we celebrate again the magic that is America, and the hope of America, then America really will be great again. And, until then, we have to fight the crazies.”
Shapiro then took questions from the audience.
One person asked about students’ choice between seeing the product of their labor through impact or a paycheck, and whether Shapiro thought American youth could make an impact without compromising their livelihood.
“I think that the choice has always existed for people between… what they might personally find most fulfilling and what is most lucrative. There’s nothing new about this,” Shapiro responded.
“If you actually want to make a lot of money and be successful and feel like you have a purpose in life, if you can find the intersection of three things, then you’ll do great. Things that you’re… uniquely good at, things people want from you, and things you love to do. If you can find the intersection of those three things, then you’ll do great,” Shapiro advised.
“If you’re looking around, you’re like, man, I’m struggling right now. That’s because you’re 20, it’s called being 20.”
“Recognize that the tradeoffs exist, and then grapple with the tradeoffs and embrace those tradeoffs and understand that you’re going to struggle, and the struggle is part of the journey,” he said.
Another student asked how college graduates should interpret the American Dream in a world where college and home prices are “skyrocketing beyond reach.”
Shapiro responded by comparing the home buying experiences of past and current generations.
“The reality is that the normal interest rate on a mortgage for most of American history was up in the seven, eight, nine, ten percent range, it was not down where we are currently experiencing.”
“When people say, everyone could afford a house in 1950, go look at the houses that they were looking at in 1950. You’re talking about little brick boxes that have no air conditioning in them,” he added.
“One of the things that we ought to recognize also is that … there are places in the country where housing is relatively affordable. It’s unaffordable in major cities like New York, but actually, the price of housing has been significantly dropping in places like Phoenix and it’s been dropping in places like Charlotte.”
However, the affordability crisis is “certainly true” about college, he said.
“I believe that it is worthwhile for people who are in STEM fields. I think for people in the liberal arts, it’s an IQ test.”
“It seems to me that it’s time to do away with that system entirely, and we should just hire people out of high school and give them apprenticeships if they are smart enough to actually perform.”
The final question of the night touched on political violence and debate rhetoric in the wake of the assassination of commentator Charlie Kirk.
“It really isn’t just debate that’s the problem. It is a conspiratorial view of politics that suggests that nothing can be cured. That there are no solutions,” Shapiro said. “Discussion doesn’t typically end in people beating the s— out of each other.”
He said he wasn’t surprised by the reason for Kirk’s assassination “because there’s a permission structure for violence implicit in the radical wing of this ideology.”
“The permission structure for violence is, if you say that a man is not a woman, you’re literally erasing the existence of this person. If you are erasing the existence of that person, you are, by necessity, a grave threat to that person.”
“You don’t try to shoot somebody because you think that their ideas are low IQ,” he said. “You try to shoot somebody because you believe that they are a full scale, danger to you and your family are going to harm you, and you believe that without any evidence whatsoever.”
Disruption threat unfulfilled
The event ran smoothly despite at least one threat of disruption online earlier in the day.
An Instagram post by laborjawn, a Philadelphia based meme page, encouraged a “noise demo” on the day of the event, calling Shapiro an “anti-union, anti-immigrant, bigoted leader of the far-right,” but no such incident occurred.
Still, the chapter leaders said the university shouldn’t have made it so difficult to get their event approved.
“Another challenge in this process has been the bureaucratic fragmentation and bloat of the University system. The approval process has involved multiple overlapping offices with no clear authority, resulting in long delays, contradictory guidance, and a lack of accountability,” Duffy told The Fix prior to the event.
He continued, “We have had nearly daily communication with the administration since December, but their slow responses, long delays, and shifting requirements have made it very difficult to plan this event.”
“We believe that the University of Pennsylvania should promote ideological diversity and bring speakers from different sides to campus.”
Duffy concluded, “However, the roadblocks and restrictions that the administration has raised in this process — inconsistent with how many left-leaning speakers are treated — raise concerns about viewpoint neutrality.”
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