In June, Campus Reform reported that Ann Atkinson, a faculty member at Arizona State University was dismissed after hosting an event with conservative speakers. Now a major university donor is siding with the former staff member.
Atkinson was the director of ASU’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, until she helped facilitate an event through the center that included speakers such as Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager.
The event was met with outrage from faculty; and ultimately, the university decided that they would be discontinuing the T.W. Lewis Center, as well as Atkinson’s position.
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Tom Lewis, the millionaire Arizona real estate developer and philanthropist after whom the T.W. Lewis Center was named, went on Fox News “The Ingraham Angle” on July 19 and announced that he would be pulling his donation from ASU, which is about $400,000 per year.
Lewis explained that his reasoning behind the decision comes from the blatant censorship that was shown on the ASU campus by Atkinson’s dismissal.
Lewis said that while he “had a great experience myself in college back in the early ‘70s,” he “finally just kind of had enough.”
“The university is just intolerable of the voice from the right, and we learned that in spades when we put on this event with Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager, and it just drove them crazy,” he said. “Number one, they don’t want donors to meddle with the classroom and they don’t want conservative speakers to speak on campus.”
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Lewis also talked about the seemingly normal trend of faculty at all universities being “radical.” Saying that a large number of them “don’t really want to teach.”
Lewis also said that ASU faculty and administrators have redefined academic freedom from “faculty’s right to pursue truth in their discipline without opposition” to “do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want.”
Campus Reform contacted the media relations team at Arizona State University, as well as Tom Lewis. This article will be updated accordingly.
Follow @courtneycmclain on Twitter.
Republished with permission from Campus Reform
