Eagle High club invited controversial Boise State professor to speak. Students responded

Dozens of students at Eagle High School jeered and walked out on a club event during lunch Thursday to protest the remarks of Scott Yenor, a Boise State University professor known for making misogynistic comments and espousing far-right talking points.

In videos posted on TikTok and elsewhere online, Yenor can be seen in the school’s auditorium talking about marriage, pedophilia and premarital sex, among other things.

Yenor gained notoriety in 2021 when he gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando and said single, career women were “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.” He also said young women should be encouraged “to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children.”

The Statesman also previously reported that Yenor, a tenured political science professor, argued in a speech that women shouldn’t be recruited into engineering, medical school or law — an idea that helped lead to protests at Boise State.

West Ada School District Chief of Staff Niki Scheppers told the Idaho Statesman in an email Friday that students from Turning Point Eagle, a club with a teacher adviser, requested that Yenor speak at their meeting “about the effect that feminism has had on our society.”

The club’s Instagram biography states that it is a “student movement fighting for traditional conservative values.” Turning Point USA is a right-wing group that tries to recruit young people into Republican politics.

Scheppers said the club followed the proper procedure to host a guest speaker at the school. In addition to the school’s resource officer, Scheppers said the school had additional law enforcement from the Ada County Sheriff’s Office on campus Thursday.

Turning Point Eagle held the event in the school’s auditorium for its members, but other students were welcome to attend, Scheppers said.

“As stated in Policy 503.20, the district provides a place on the school’s premises for students to meet during non-instructional time for all school sponsored clubs,” she said. “It is also important to recognize that while a facility is provided, the club’s meetings, ideas and activities are not sponsored or endorsed in any way by the board, the schools, or by school or district employees.”

Child was ‘unsafe,’ Eagle High parent says

Liza Long, the mother of an Eagle High School senior, said her LGBTQ child did not feel safe during Yenor’s speech.

Long said other students were handing out flyers with pictures of guns on them. Long picked up her child early from school Thursday and discussed the possibility of switching to home-schooling.

“These are some pretty toxic views for my child,” she told the Statesman in a phone interview. “If this had been a college campus, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, bring it, let him give a speech,’ but I think in the high school setting, it’s just inappropriate on so many levels.”

Long, who works at a local college, said she believes in free speech and defended Yenor’s right to have his views in an academic setting in 2021. She said she just would have liked to have known in advance that the controversial professor would be speaking Thursday.

“I believe you should listen to people, and those students walked out on him, so that shows that students are able to critically think and evaluate ideas,” Long said. “But just knowing that the school allowed this to happen on campus has created an environment where quite a few students like my child feel unsafe.”