BSU professor’s high school talk shows free speech works and the kids are all right | Opinion

Controversial Boise State University professor Scott Yenor brought his misogynistic and anachronistic message to a group of Eagle High School students, and he got the reception he deserved.

In a series of videos of the event shared on social media, dozens of students booed, heckled, jeered and eventually walked out on Yenor’s speech.

Yenor reportedly spoke during the lunch period on the invitation of the Turning Point student club at Eagle High School, part of Turning Point USA, a far-right national organization that peddles conspiracy theories and radical ideology.

As background, Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State, gained notoriety a year ago when he gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, calling single career women “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and saying young women should be encouraged “to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children.”

“Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers,” he said. “Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.”

He brought that same message to Eagle High.

First of all, Yenor’s speech at Eagle — however odious — at the invitation of a student group should be welcomed. Students should be exposed to a wide range of ideas, apply critical thinking skills to those ideas and decide for themselves whether those ideas hold water.

Too often in academia, we have seen attempts to shut down speech, when we should be encouraging participation in the marketplace of ideas.

The good students of Eagle High who attended Yenor’s speech gave us a promising example of what happens when we open up free speech, rather than shut it down.

Yenor said his piece, and the vast majority of the students in attendance applied their critical thinking skills and demonstrated very clearly what they think of Yenor’s ideas — which were exposed to the sunlight of public scrutiny and were overwhelmingly rejected.

Good for the Eagle students for recognizing an aging relic clinging desperately to the last vestiges of an absurd patriarchy.

Knowing that “kids these days” are rejecting these types of antiquated notions, perhaps that’s why Republican legislators such as Reps. Bruce Skaug and Barbara Ehardt decided to ban anyone younger than 18 from testifying at their committee hearings.

Judging from the students rejecting Yenor’s message, the kids are just fine.