Trinitonian
Seeing double
Women’s Basketball
KRTU at SXSW
Indie Overnight to host Live Rooftop Showcase during interdisciplinary festival.
Trinity students with doppelgängers share experiences being mistaken for someone else. PAGE 16 PULSE
Team wins Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Championship.
PAGE 18 A&E
PAGE 20 SPORTS
Serving Trinity University Since 1902
Volume 114 Issue 21
MARCH 03, 2017
Disrupting D’Souza: dangerous or defensible? Student response to upcoming speaker ignites debate over harassment, respect
A collection of the flyers were returned to the dorm of organizers as a form of protest to Dinesh D’Souza coming to campus. D’Souza will be speaking at Trinity on March 7 at 7 p.m. in Laurie Auditorium. photos by OSVALDO VASQUEZ BY DANIEL CONRAD
NEWS REPORTER Dinesh D’Souza, conservative IndianAmerican political commentator and filmmaker, will be delivering a free public lecture titled “What’s So Great About America?” to Laurie Auditorium at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, Mar. 7. Jonah and Manfred Wendt — sophomores and chief officers of Tigers for Liberty, the student organization that invited D’Souza to campus — filed harassment reports with Trinity University police after students upturned American flags outside of their room and returned promotional flyers with messages for the brothers last Saturday. Students, media outlets and university officials have commented on the situation. D’Souza details Tigers for Liberty wanted to bring D’Souza to campus in order to bring the campus in conversation with other politically inclined citizens of San Antonio. “When we host lectures, we don’t just host them for students. We host them for the entire community,” Jonah said. “Dinesh is a well-known figure in the conservative community, so hosting him is an opportunity to connect with folks, both students and from outside of Trinity.” Jonah Wendt explained that the process to bring D’Souza to Trinity began over a year ago, when he met D’Souza at a conference in Washington, D.C. “Last year, I had the opportunity to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference in D.C., and while I was there, I personally
asked [D’Souza] to come speak here,” Wendt said. “He replied, ‘Go talk to the Young America’s Foundation.’” The Young America’s Foundation, an outreach organization promoting conservative activism for youth and young adults, offered to fund half of the $10,000 honorarium for bringing D’Souza. Tigers for Liberty acquired $6,000 from Student Government Association (SGA) in November last year: $5,000 to pay for the rest of D’Souza’s honorarium, and $1,000 to cover the cost of advertising and security. SGA heard the funding request on Nov. 7 and granted approval on Nov. 21. Samy Abdallah, junior class senator on SGA, explained that student government processes many funding requests one at a time in the order that they are submitted. “We only have so much time that we can spend in a session,” Abdallah said. “We’re able to hear a lot of requests, discuss them and vote on them, but sometimes funding requests are not able to be fully [considered] until weeks after their initial proposal was heard.” Students push back Jonah described the resistance he experienced as a result of organizing the lecture. “[Last] Friday night, around 8 p.m., I left my dorm with Manfred, [first-year] Taryn Woodall and a member of University of Incarnate Word College Republicans representative, and we went around putting flyers on doors,” Jonah said. “This is pretty status-quo for most organizations. … We hit every single door on campus, we think. We came back to my room around 9:30, 10 o’clock-ish, and we realized there were about 50 flyers shoved back underneath my door
with this note that was like, ‘Hey, we think you lost this. We returned them.’” Jonah said that a resident advisor attempted to confront one student who was removing the flyers, but the student fled the scene before being identified or apprehended. “I woke up this morning [Saturday] […] and noticed that both of our American flags outside our room were turned upsidedown,” Jonah said. “There was a stack of flyers attached to my brother’s door.” In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Jonah called the move “a clear attempt at intimidation.” That day, Jonah filed a harassment report with university police and notified Residential Life so that the incident would be documented. Jonah admitted that he wasn’t surprised by students’ reactions. “This is pretty status-quo for most conservative lectures on college campuses,” Jonah said. “There’s always someone who decides, ‘I’m going to do my little part and push back against those evil conservatives!’ This kid decided to pick up 228 flyers and write notes on them and returning them to our dorm.” Jonah displayed some of the “liberal yellingpoints” written on the flyers underneath the title of the lecture, “What Makes America So Great?”: ‘black people,’ ‘tacos,’ ‘immigrants,’ ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘Muslims’ were among the phrases written on the flyers. “Yeah, I kind of agree with you guys,” Jonah said. Sharon Jones-Schweitzer, assistant vice president for external relations, told the Rivard Report that university police did not find any of the messages to be threatening.
Fostering a diversity of dialogues Jonah took to the Young America’s Foundation website and penned an editorial on the situation. “Nothing seems to get to a liberal quite like a conservative voicing their opinion,” Jonah wrote. “The leftists can tear down our flyers, they can deface our flags and they can attempt to intimidate us, but the Young Americans for Freedom at Trinity University will continue to boldly advance freedom.” He also lauded the university administration for not attempting to censor conservative voices. Jonah also spoke to a reporter from “Campus Reform,” a self-proclaimed watchdog for political bias in American universities. “These leftist intimidation tactics will not phase us,” he said. The incident resulted in a number of responses from media outlets and university officials. Nick Santulli, president of SGA, was critical of students’ failure to live up to standards of civil discourse. “In order to build trust in a community, you shouldn’t obstruct the speech of people who disagree with you,” Santulli said. “You shouldn’t tear down their materials and get in the way of marketing their event. At the same time, you shouldn’t try to demonize opposing views. I think that goes for both sides; everyone can improve.” Jones-Schweitzer penned a response to heated debates in the Trinity University Alumni group on Facebook. continued on page 4