Republicans Host Campus Free Speech Roundtable

Inside Higher Ed

Jessica Blake

December 12, 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C.—As a young Black woman from the blue state of Illinois, Jasmyn Jordan said hearing former vice president Mike Pence speak at a Young Americans for Freedom event  at the University of Iowa her freshman year marked one of the first times she witnessed a prominent speaker who shared her beliefs and values.

Seeking a safe space to express her views, Jordan quickly joined her campus chapter of the conservative student organization. But as she rose in the ranks from local secretary to YAF national chairwoman, she realized that on college campuses, “conservative values did not get the same playing field as more left-leaning ones.”

“As soon as I joined the organization, I was attacked by Black students because they felt like I couldn’t be Black and a woman and a conservative at the same time,” Jordan, now a senior, told Inside Higher Ed. “They were calling me a white supremacist, a token, a bigot. And that really opened my eyes to see how conservatives are attacked simply for expressing their constitutional rights.”

This kind of “doxxing,” as Jordan described it, was what led her to speak about the climate of campus free speech before a group of congressional Republicans Wednesday. (Doxxing is defined as “to publicly publish private information about [someone] especially as a form of punishment or revenge.”)

The roundtable discussion, hosted by North Carolina representative Gregory Murphy, reinforced the GOP’s argument that colleges and universities across the country have become liberal bastions that do not welcome intellectual diversity.

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