“We must encourage institutions to appropriately account for this bedrock principle in their administration of student life and to avoid creating environments that stifle competing perspectives, thereby potentially impeding beneficial research and undermining learning,” states the executive order.
“It is the policy of the Federal Government to: encourage institutions to foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate, including through compliance with the First Amendment for public institutions and compliance with stated institutional policies regarding freedom of speech for private institutions,” continues the order.
The president’s decision arrives amid the championing by Turning Point USA founder and Executive Director Charlie Kirk, and after conservative activist Hayden Williams, who had been recruiting members for UC Berkeley’s Turning Point USA chapter last month, was violently assaulted in a politically-motivated attack on the school’s campus.
“You’ve fought bravely for your rights, and now, you have a president who is also fighting for you, I’m with you all the way,” said President Trump to a group of students on Thursday, shortly before signing the executive order.
Charlie Kirk told Breitbart News in a statement on Thursday that the president’s executive order is an important and personal matter for him, as this type of change on college campuses has been “the primary mission” of his organization.
“Today’s executive order is the culmination of Turning Point USA’s tireless work to break the left’s stranglehold on campus, a grip that has suffocated the free exchange of ideas and helped indoctrinate an entire generation to hate America, the freest, most prosperous, decent and generous country ever to exist,” continued the Turning Point USA founder.
The lack of respect for free speech on college campuses has not been an issue isolated to only a few far-left academic bastions, but has become a problem that, at this point, is generally understood to be plaguing a plethora of schools across the country.
Just last week, the staff at Georgia Southern University called the police on its own students as an intimidation tactic in an attempt to get them to stop exercising free speech in an outdoor area on the publicly-funded university grounds. Moreover, the students were, again, conservatives, who had been outside merely trying to recruit members for their Turning Point USA student group.