Nationwide conservative student group demands ‘Contract for Safe Campus Dialogue’

Following the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, Young America’s Foundation has launched a campaign calling on campus leaders to do more to protect all students, but especially conservative, center-right ones.

The organization’s president, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, recently sent a letter to “every college and university in America” asking them to commit to protecting students’ First Amendment rights. 

Walker urged campus presidents and governing boards to sign a “Contract for Safe Campus Dialogue” — and publicize their commitment.

“It is beyond high time that colleges and universities acknowledge that they have a special responsibility to create a safe environment for the free and open exchange of ideas and open inquiry on their campuses,” Walker wrote in the letter.

Campus leaders are called on to “ensure that conservatives, as well as others along the ideological spectrum, are welcome to talk on campus” and are supported equally, as well as to “ensure that students, speakers, and staff are safe at all events on campus by allocating appropriate security.”

Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Walker’s Young America’s Foundation — which between the two have thousands of campus chapters across America — both have a direct focus on encouraging, enabling, educating and equipping high school and college students to defend conservative principles.

Their chapters on college campuses host a variety of political activists, often which prompt cancel culture campaigns, and sometimes spawning protests that turn violent.

In 2016, for example, hundreds of student demonstrators at Cal State University Los Angeles blocked the entrance to a theater where conservative Ben Shapiro gave a YAF speech in a protest so rowdy that several shoving matches ensued.

In 2022, Black Lives Matter activists at the University at Buffalo shut down a YAF speech featuring Allen West that got so heated police officers had to escort West out of the building.

Walker, in his memo, wrote colleges and universities are responsible and obligated to promote free expression on campus: “However, no institution of higher education—public or private—can be worthy of the name if it permits the assassin’s veto to silence free expression, inquiry, and association.”

YAF’s Chief Communications Officer Spencer Brown told The College Fix it’s vital to support students willing to take a stand.

“Through YAF chapters and other conservative groups on campuses across the country, bold students continue to advance our ideas and introduce their peers to intellectually diverse viewpoints,” Brown said via email. 

“By exercising their First Amendment rights, advocating for their beliefs, and exposing their peers to conservative ideas, they will continue to do the important work of providing an alternative to the Left’s failed orthodoxy.”

Brown said the “Contract for Safe Campus Dialogue” is just another way YAF is working to ensure that dialogue happens. 

“As YAF has warned about for decades — and in some cases taken legal action to remedy — too many institutions of higher learning ignore harassment and targeting of conservative students and their ideas,” he said.

Colleges will return signed contracts to the foundation, and a list of signatories is expected to be released to the public, according to Brown.

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