On Wednesday, nearly 200 University of Wisconsin students debated David Horowitz’s planned trip to Madison next month.
The visit was one of several discussions regarding the future of campus diversity and multicultural issues.
As a follow-up to its Sept. 26 march for the Jena Six, the Wisconsin Black Student Union hosted the True Diversity Forum in hopes to make a progressive movement in improving the environment for students of color at UW.
Horowitz is an American conservative author whose books include "Race Card: White Guilt, Black Resentment, and the Assault on Truth and Justice" and "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left."
UW junior Mattie Duppler, vice chair of the College Republicans, is among those who are involved with bringing Horowitz to campus.
"We want people to come out to see that there is an issue," Duppler said. "People have discolored his argument about the ideological differences as someone subverting their religion and using it as their claim."
UW senior Katrina Flores, executive member of the MultiCultural Student Coalition, said Wednesday's forum was the start of a conversation and hopes it will not slowly diverge as many of these types of discussions tend to do.
"We need to continue talking, and I hope people understand that they need to be listening to folks," Flores said. "We need to be open to redefining our movement."
Other students, like UW senior Chris Dols, a member of the Campus Antiwar Network, firmly testified against the Horowitz visitation, saying there is an enormous amount of hypocrisy around the question of free speech.
"We're told that we're supposed to respect David Horowitz and let him speak, but this university calls the police on an anti-war activist for going into an informal session with Halliburton," Dols said. "There's a double standard. That's not free speech. We're against David Horowitz speaking here and we're going to find ways to show that."
Horowitz is scheduled to visit UW on Monday, Oct. 22, at a location to be determined.
The discussion of Plan 2008, a university's initiative to increase diversity on campus, was also among student concerns. As 2008 approaches, some students fear the plan has not met its intended goals, and do not know what will happen after the plan expires.
"We need to attack the system. When we go systemic, then we're solving causes of problems and not symptoms," Flores said. "We need to focus not on the symptoms but on the cause of the problem — digging at the roots, and that will eventually happen with more conversations like this."
