The Fight Against Wokeism Isn’t New
The “Cambridge Declaration,” a timeless document as relevant today as it was when released, approaches its third decade. It’s time to revisit it in combating wokeism...
PUBLIUS SPECIAL GUEST: Dave Gentry, CEO of RedChip Companies, Inc., an investor relations and media firm and the author of Small Stocks, Big Money. In 1994 he co-founded the First Amendment Coalition, an independent, nonprofit, collegiate-based student organization, and received national and international attention for his work defending free speech on college campuses.
Twenty-nine years ago, a group of graduate and undergraduate students from a large Southern university organized a national conference in defense of intellectual freedom on college and university campuses. They chose to take the fight to the epicenter of what was then called political correctness. On April 11, 1994, students from nearly 50 colleges and universities converged on Harvard Yard in what the Washington Post at the time called “the spring offensive in the continuing battle on the nation’s campuses over issues of freedom, civility, and rights.”
The skirmishing, wrote the reporter, took place at Harvard but was typical of the campus culture wars raging from Bowdoin to Berkeley. In 1992, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had summed up the state of affairs in his book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, writing that “a particularly ugly mood seems to have settled over the one arena where freedom of inquiry and expression should be most unconstrained and civility most respected—our colleges and universities.”
Led by the First Amendment Coalition, a student organization founded at the University of Florida (not the legal entity FAC), the national conference was sponsored by the Harvard Conservative Club, the National Association of Scholars, the Young America’s Foundation, and David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now the David Horowitz Freedom Center). At the conference, students from across the nation ratified a document called the“Cambridge Declaration,” a manifesto of beliefs and concerns regarding the present state of higher education in America. Written by two graduate students at UF and edited by leaders of a sister chapter at the University of Pennsylvania, the Declaration was sent to presidents of the colleges and universities represented at the conference.
The conference attracted national and international media from both liberal and conservative outlets, including the Voice of America, the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, Investor’s Business Daily, and even the Wall Street Journal. It was the first time students representing a wide cross-section of American colleges and universities had gathered in one place to call on university presidents, administrators, professors, and students to reaffirm their commitment, in word and deed, to intellectual diversity, universal standards, and academic freedom.
“We must immerse ourselves in that great body of literature called the Western tradition, whose . . . themes are liberty and freedom,” I, along with David Horowitz and other speakers, exhorted the students and faculty in the audience. About 50 chapters of the student-led First Amendment Coalition were established as a result of the conference. Start-up packets were given to students, providing practical guidance on how to start their own chapters.
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BIO: Dave Gentry is the CEO of RedChip Companies, Inc., an investor relations and media firm and the author of Small Stocks, Big Money published by Wiley. In 1994 he co-founded the First Amendment Coalition, an independent, nonprofit, collegiate-based student organization, and received national and international attention for his work defending free speech on college campuses. Gentry’s activism led to his publication 100+ Cases of Campus Censorship, published by Second Thoughts Books. Gentry earned his Master of Education from the University of Florida in 1993.
Gentry is also founder of The RedChip Money Report, a weekly financial news show broadcasted on Fox Business, Bloomberg Europe, and Bloomberg Asia. He has been a consultant to more than 400 public and private companies and is a nationally recognized thought leader in the microcap sector.
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Dave Gentry, CEO of RedChip Companies, Inc., an investor relations and media firm and the author of Small Stocks, Big Money. In 1994 he co-founded the First Amendment Coalition, an independent, nonprofit, collegiate-based student organization, and received national and international attention for his work defending free speech on college campuses.