Conservative professor, columnist speaks at MU

Mike Adams spoke about crises facing free speech on college campuses.

By Kyle Daly

Published Feb. 6, 2009

Mike Adams is at war, and his fight is long from over.

Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and a columnist for the conservative Web site Townshall.com, spoke to MU students and faculty Thursday night about his war against unconstitutional policies on college campuses in a presentation titled "The Constitutional Crisis in Higher Education."

The Young America's Foundation and the MU College Republicans sponsored the presentation.

Adams said he believes there is a very serious crisis going on in higher education.

"It is my contention that an understanding of and a respect for the constitution, and a robust discourse that is suppose to accompany it, is worse on college campuses than just about any other place in America," he said.

Adams said if there was one place where the First Amendment facilitates a free and open marketplace of ideas, it should be the American university.

"But we find American universities are often the most intolerant places to work," Adams said.

Adams said college administrators are setting policies they know to be illegal.

Adams offered specific examples of these acts, including one about a speech he delivered to the College Republicans group at the University of North Carolina- Greensboro in February 2004.

While waiting to deliver his speech to the College Republicans, Adams said he picked up a copy of the student newspaper. The front-page story was about a porn star that came to the university to give a speech on safe sodomy. Adams read further into the story and discovered that both the university's Student Health Center and Office of Student Life gave $1,500 to the porn star to finance her speech.

"The office actually made the declaration that a Republican is more offensive than a porn star," Adams said.

After giving his speech, Adams spoke to members of the College Republicans, who told Adams the organization was having trouble putting on events due to the rule that the Office of Student Life could not fund them because they were a political group.

Adams told them that, according to a 2000 Supreme Court decision, the university was breaking the law.

Adams cited the case University of Wisconsin v. Southworth, in which the court said the viewpoint of a student group could have no bearing on whether the group receives funding from student activities fees.

Adams said the incident frustrated him so much he decided to write a column about it, describing how the student group had been discriminated against and how the college had decided to fund a porn star instead of a conservative Republican.

After the column was published, UNC-Greensboro quickly denied that the speaker in question was a porn star. Adams gathered evidence against this statement and went public, eventually embarrassing the university. In the end, the College Republican group at the university received money to fund events and activities.

The university even invited Adams back, this time paying him $3,000 for his services. With part of the money, Adams bought a gun and went hunting, sending the picture of the deer he killed to PETA. Adams used another part of the money so a student could start another student newspaper on the UNC-Greensboro campus.

MU College Republicans Chairman Jonathan Ratliff said he doesn't believe MU faces the same problems of the administration cutting down speech rights as the University of North Carolina-Greensboro did.

"There are some things we have problems with," Ratliff said, "But Mizzou is not a Berkley."

Janie Gibson, the MU College Republicans vice chairwoman of social affairs, said because she has a science major, she doesn't experience many professors that push liberal views upon students.

"I have friends in the journalism school who do talk about it," she said.