Meh. Celebrate the fact that said students signing the petition will be spending (literally) the next fifteen years of their lives paying back their education loans; and will be surpassed by the home-schooled kids who can read, write, and do math.

Exactly how much expertise does a person need to have to know that if you don’t have sex, you don’t get pregnant? (I mean, except that once?)

How utterly childish.

So instead of Palin, who would have brought much needed publicity to the forum, they will instead have a guest speaker whose name I have already forgotten by the time it took me to leave the linked article and type this comment.

I hope every single person who signed that Facebook petition has an illegitimate child. I’m evil that way. LOL

Washington University is private, so it can spend money on what it wishes. But paying Bristol Palin to attend? As a student I might oppose that sort of spending on just the principal of spending. Yes, it is good Bristol Palin did not abort her child. But beyond that, her role is just to bring attention to forum?

Now I understand the several hundred students who protested probably did so for partisan reasons that they dislike her mother. They are free to do so, but I disagree with them doing so on that basis alone. I would also fully support any college paying a sizable honorarium for Sarah Palin to speek since she would have things important to say on a host of issues.

I’ve often thought the presidential history of the Democrats looked like that illustration, the March of Evolution in reverse, with Thomas Jefferson striding erect at the rear, and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama capering about up front.

Why do all of the insults come from the right in every article I read? Don’t you guys have a life?

Hello All,

I am the Philip Thomas cited in the article and I thought I would drop by to let you know that many of your points are wrong or incomplete.

1. WashU has ~6,000 undergraduates, not the 13,000 stated in your article.
Source: http://admissions.wustl.edu/faq/pages/aboutwashingtonuniversity.aspx

2. I am not a Democrat and nowhere do I make such an assertion.

3. You seem to imply that the petition was a mere partisan effort. In fact, the College Democrat’s event to organize active protests on Facebook has over 1100 confirmed members, constituting about 18% of the student body, which is over seven times the size of the WUSTL College Democrats page on Facebook. My petition ended with 563 names, constituting about 9% of the undergraduate student body. Furthermore, some of the most vocal activists on campus against this speech are Republicans. Ryan McComb, cited in countless news sources today and one of the leading forces of the movement, is a Republican.
Source: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_184571138243454&view=doc&id=185217314845503

4. Your assertion is that the petition focused primarily on the fact that students were opposed to Bristol Palin speaking on campus. In fact, one of the largest impetuses of this controversy was the cost of the speech. $20,000 was allotted for a person who lacks college education, preaches abstinence while holding her child born out of wedlock, and who tries to use being a single mother to convince people to be abstinent when in fact she is bringing in $15-30k a speech solely due to Tripp. The campus has been having budget problems, student groups are losing funding and tuition is going up. Students were surprised when such a large amount of money was allotted for this event with such little notice and debate. It’s a superfluous speech when considering the cost.

5. The last speaker to be denied a speech on WUSTL grounds was in fact Barack Obama. It is not a fallacy, as you alluded at the end of your article.

6. We are not biased against Republicans and respect academic debate. The four-person panel apart of which Palin was scheduled to speak included members from the Catholic Student Center on campus and Missouri Right to Life, both of which ostensibly promote abstinence. While Palin has been canceled, these two panelists remain, showing that there is not a bias against the viewpoint of abstinence. We want fairness, but we also want it accurately represented.

College is increasingly becoming a huge economic mistake for kids. Why all this nonsense when it has very little to do with subjects supposedly taught at the University level? I sure as heck don’t want to bust my back for years to send a kid to a place where a big deal is made over a “sexual responsibility week?”

Waiting until college to teach sexual responsibility is like waiting until they reach age thirty to talk to your kids about life.

What the hell. Obamacare has us retaining kids as dependents until well past the age of 21.

K~Bob,

I would like to point out that is not Obama’s policies that keep children dependent past the age of 21. It is the Republicans who have notoriously cut funding to public universities that would supply adults with a useful and beneficial education. As someone currently attending college, I work as much as possible every week and still come up short much of the time. I don’t go out or spend money frivolously, yet I still can’t fund my own education. This did not use to be the case for college students of the not-too-distant past. I hope you search the policy of your party before you point fingers at the wrong people.

sell your kool aid elsewhere pal. quit spinning. everyone knows the real reasons. why else would you have such a distasteful cartoon. you people are idiots. i would say that her experience would make her the most knowledeable speaker. you just want to shut up anyone who dissents. when was obama denied by the way