By: Greer Brigham ‘20 & David Sacks ‘22

Over the last three years, a coalition of students under the banner of Brown SPEAK has analyzed the political diversity of campus speakers. Every year, the data have led us to the same resounding conclusion — Brown University does not have nearly enough political diversity within its lecture series, with a clear lack of conservative voices. 2019 was no different. In a poll of speakers from Brown’s most politically-relevant speaker series, we found that 0% identified as Republican, 0% voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, and only 6.9% listed themselves as somewhat conservative on a scale of extremely conservative to extremely liberal (and 0% identified as extremely conservative, in contrast to the 24.1% that identified as extremely liberal).*

These data largely match up with statistics from past years, when we analyzed the political campaign donations, career history, and social media statements of every speaker to come to campus in a political series. In 2017, this technique led us to conclude that only 5.5% of speakers leaned right politically, and in 2018 we found that only 5.6% leaned right politically. While some have suggested that this data is biased by the fact that most professors tend to lean left, and Brown mostly invites professors, we have found in the past that these trends continue even if we look at non-professors in the data. Others have suggested that the bias is due to the large number of international speakers that come to campus. However, when we limit our data to only speakers that have lived in the United States, and to speaking events ostensibly about American politics, the bias once again continues. No matter which way you slice it, Brown severely underrepresents conservatives in its speaker series.

There is one caveat — the big names. Brown has indeed invited some important conservatives to campus recently, including former Governors Jeb Bush and John Kasich, former AEI President Arthur Brooks, former RNC Chairperson Michael Steele, and former UK Prime Minister Theresa May. These invitations represent an important step in the right direction for the administration. However, as our data indicates, changes in big name speakers have not trickled down to Brown speaking events more broadly. Moreover, these speakers tend to represent only the most moderate/establishment parts of conservatism.



* We had a response rate of 17.1%, with 32 speakers responding out of 187 contacted.



Reflections on the Data — David Sacks ‘22



This campus has no shortage of those who despise our current President and everything he stands for. For the 2016 election, only 4.2% of our students favored a Republican candidate, and no members of our faculty donated to a Republican candidate. When so few students and faculty are openly conservative, we run the risk of becoming an echo chamber; how can we have an open and wide-encompassing discussion if one important side is simply not represented? In such conditions it is easy to imagine that all of our students, not simply the (vast) majority, agree with us on most issues, and worse, easy to assume that anyone who has different ideas is either an idiot or of bad moral character.

It takes more effort to be charitable to our opponents than to dismiss them in summary fashion. It is easy to demonize that which we do not understand. But if we wish to be most effective in pursuit of our own goals, related to policy or not, we have to keep an open mind and most of all, think critically. If we do not, we are in danger, as John Stuart Mill would say, of falling into dead dogma. To him, an idea, “however true,” must be “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed” so that it remains a “living truth.” An idea’s vitality — even an idea we hold fundamental and self-evident — depends on the vigor with which it is discussed and debated.

Per Mill, opinions, even imperfect, may contain elements of truth or challenge us to think in ways we haven’t yet considered. Students who face a staunch conservative have an opportunity to articulate opposition. Students who agree with this hypothetical staunch conservative have the opportunity to see their ideas at work, aired in a public forum and, because of this public airing, a chance to see their ideas challenged. Such opportunities provide students whose opinions go against the grain to have their views aired and challenged, and force students who, being in the majority, may take their own views for granted to articulate them. Thus is Mill’s goal accomplished: neither side may persuade the other, but their arguments will be strengthened, and the bystander will leave more informed.

The goal of the university should not be one of activism. It is the students’ prerogative, of course, to advocate for what they believe. But the university’s job is to provide a free and open environment in which students may grapple with the widest possible variety of ideas. Encountering challenging ideas is not something from which to shield students; we are young and have a lifetime to modify our views and consider an endlessly expanding spate of issues. None of us holds the key to the truth; the truth is a goal at which we can only hope to work if we do so, together, and in a spirit of camaraderie. We need good faith, and we need — very much — to consider and work with ideas antithetical to those we hold dear. A greater diversity of opinion in our invited speakers, thus, is essential, even if — especially if — we as a community have our ideas more rigorously challenged than ever before.



Founder’s Farewell — Greer Brigham ‘20

This is a bittersweet moment, as it now comes time to sign off from SPEAK after over three years. The idea of this group actually sparked even earlier — in November of 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidency. I had volunteered throughout the Clinton campaign, and while chance always plays a role in politics, I felt secure that the Secretary of State would cruise to an easy victory over the inexperienced real estate tycoon. As I watched the returns come in from the Brown Students for Hillary watch party — the HERSTORY banner only half-painted — the magnitude of this miscalculation shook me.

Here I was, studying politics at one of the most prestigious colleges, and I had been caught completely off guard by a tectonic political shift across the nation. I needed to reassess where I was getting my information. To this end, I started travelling and getting odd jobs in red states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina, and Wisconsin. As I encountered people of widely different backgrounds, it struck me how uncommon these perspectives were at Brown. Mostly liberal students with mostly liberal faculty with mostly liberal administrators with mostly liberal speakers — all creating an echo chamber that hid the political changes on the right that I missed in 2016. This echo chamber needed to change, and while I ran into ethically complex ground when it came to changing the make-up of students, faculty, and administrators, these problems disappeared with speakers. It became clear to me that they provided the easiest way for a university to expose students to different perspectives, while not changing the character of the school itself.

In this conclusion, I found myself far from alone — both at Brown and at other colleges across the country. Just by scanning the headlines, anyone can see how many efforts to increase political diversity of speakers ends in chaos and damage for everyone involved. For this reason, as a team of similarly-driven students assembled at Brown around this cause, we took great lengths to design a strategy that would not damage the campus that we all loved. At the beginning, we drew a line on obviously fringe or extremist speakers, as well as those individuals that we called ‘spectacle speakers’ based on their passion for blowing up campuses rather than engaging in productive dialogue. We also mainly kept the conversation on campus, rather than running to the national media, and focused on data over rhetoric; we saw that the facts spoke for themselves, and we acknowledged that the most important conversations had to take place between Brown students, faculty, and administrators.

This thoughtful strategy has been far from easy in execution. The massive data collection involved in the prior SPEAK reports called for our group’s members to sacrifice large amounts of their already-limited college free time, while moments of celebration and personal recognition of these sacrifices were few and far between. Yet despite this, for three years Brown students of all different backgrounds and political beliefs stepped forward to shoulder the burden out of recognition of the necessity of SPEAK’s mission. The names of these students, as well as countless faculty advisers, are too numerous to be repeated and honored here.

And now, as my own graduation approaches, I admit to feeling mixed about the future of this cause. After all our work, the university did increase the number of big name moderate conservative speakers. We did get the message out to our community, as can be seen in the content change of the BDH’s editorial pages and in the scores of letters we received from alumni and current students thanking us for taking a stand on this issue. And yet… we still have so far to go. A true political diversity of speakers does not exist on Brown’s campus today, and likely will not for some time to come. What faith I do have lies on the shoulders of the next generation of students who, out of a love for this campus, want to see it change in this way for the better. I’ve had the privilege of working alongside some of these students — these Gadflys, if you will — and I feel confident that they will carry this cause further than my peers and I were able to.

In closing, to quote Dr. King (as quoted in our first report):



“Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.

With love,

Greer