WAVERLY — A woman who was denied official status for her conservative student organization at Wartburg College was invited to witness President Donald Trump sign an executive order meant to bolster such groups.
Wartburg junior Emily Russell, who tried starting a Turning Point USA chapter on her campus, was invited to the White House to watch the president sign an executive order that purports to protect the right to free speech on college campuses by threatening to take away federal research dollars.
Russell, a Parkersburg native, was one of around 100 students invited by The Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that trains conservative political activists, “because of our public battles with our colleges regarding free speech suppression of conservatives and conservative organizations,” she said.
“They nominated me because of what happened at Wartburg,” Russell said.
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Russell and another now-graduated student tried to gain approval for their Turning Point USA student group. They were denied by Wartburg’s Student Senate because of perceived tactics by the national organization, most notably a “professor watchlist” Russell said would be kept out of Wartburg’s organization.
On her own dime, Russell flew to Washington, D.C., on March 20 for the signing March 21. The Leadership Institute housed her.
“It’s one of those things that’s probably never going to happen to me again,” Russell said. “So I asked around, and friends and family helped me come up with the money.”
At The Leadership Institute, she and other conservative students had a morning of “media training,” where they did mock interviews and learned how to develop talking points.
The group later went to the White House’s East Room. Russell was seated in the second row behind Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Turning Point USA president Charlie Kirk.
“I was just kind of sitting there like, ‘I don’t belong here.’ I felt so out of place,” she said. “It was unreal. I had to literally pinch myself.”
Trump’s executive order regarding conservative thought on college campuses has been years in the making.
After protests broke out at the University of California at Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, Trump first posted to Twitter about taking away federal funds for schools that didn’t “allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view.”
In October 2017, the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank advocating for increased individual freedoms and free enterprise, published a report recommending withholding federal research dollars from universities which “practice viewpoint discrimination.”
“Taxpayer funds should not subsidize research at institutions where free inquiry is compromised,” the AEI report stated.
Trump previewed his executive order at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, which Russell also attended.
“Under the guise of speech codes, safe spaces and trigger warnings, these universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity, and shut down the voices of great young Americans like those here today,” Trump said in the speech announcing his executive order last week. “All of that changes starting right now."
Russell said it was “cool to see how a White House event worked.” She said Trump didn’t use a teleprompter, which she took to mean he was “trying to really resonate with us.”
“I felt really connected to (Trump),” Russell said.
She met and took a photo with DeVos, who she described as “really personable,” and took the opportunity while in D.C. to stop by the offices of U.S. Reps. Abby Finkenauer and Steve King as well as Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Russell’s not sure yet how the executive order would affect Wartburg, a private college, if a TPUSA chapter was tried on campus again. She stepped aside as the group’s president after she was elected president of the Wartburg College Republicans.
She said second-year student Reid Kallenbach will lead the TPUSA effort, though she plans to work closely with him.
“Our student leaders have always been very strong. We’ve had to be on the defense. We have been targeted on campus,” Russell said. “Honestly, we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing, and it’s nice knowing the president has our backs.”