Oklahoma Christian University College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation (YAF) are teaming up to bring Fox News commentator Katie Pavlich to campus this Thursday, Feb. 16.
According to Associate Professor of History and faculty sponsor Gary Lindsay, the event is courtesy of some of Oklahoma Christian’s donors, Richard and Mo Anderson, who funded the lecture.
“YAF is a group that assists student groups on campuses in bringing big-time speakers to campus,” chapter president Morgan Cocklin said. “It has been fairly easy working with YAF because they do all of the corresponding with the speaker and then they relay the information back to us. It’s been really great working with them.”
Lindsay said Pavlich will be lecturing on corruption in the government and will only speak for part of the time, leaving time for students to text in questions.
“This lecture is set up so that students can hear a differing viewpoint, but also allow them to challenge her if they want,” Lindsay said. “There have been situations recently where students have heard there was a speaker coming to campus that they didn’t agree with, so they took a stand against them. The most recent being UC Berkeley, where a man was coming to speak and students protested the lecture by rioting, throwing things and damaging school property. Thankfully, we are not having that problem here.”
Vice President of Oklahoma Christian College Republicans Christopher Parker said he is looking forward to the lecture and listening to what Pavlich has to say.
“I am expecting that she will discuss what we can do and the grassroots to solve some issues,” Parker said. “There are people on both sides of the aisle who care about big government corruption and doing something about it. Regardless of who you like in this past election, there were people on both sides who were calling that out.”
According to Cocklin, Oklahoma Christian College Republicans received its charter Aug. 9, 2016, after being voted into the Oklahoma Federation of College Republicans by other chapter presidents around the state.
“I saw a huge gap in political literacy and activism, and with the following semester falling right in the middle of election season I saw a huge opportunity to get people involved on the state and national level,” Cocklin said. “The goal of our organization — the Oklahoma Christian chapter of College Republicans — is to encourage civic awareness, activism and the ideals of conservative America by our leadership and example.”
Parker said there have been previous efforts to start a republican organization but were unsuccessful.
“We’ve existed before, off and on, at different times in the university’s history,” Parker said. “This past summer was when Morgan, myself, Cody Milner and some others were putting in the effort to put a college republican group back together. There had actually been some people who were trying to do this for a while, or wanting to and not really being able to get the group together with everyone having the time.”
According to Parker, officer elections took place during a conference call over the summer after the organization was established.
“After the officers were elected and the organization was really established, we had a booth or something during freshman orientation,” Parker said. “Then, last semester we had one event which was bringing Adam Pugh to speak, he was just elected to the state senate here in Edmond. Our email list is over one hundred now, I don’t know the exact number, but we have a number of people on the list and several officers. We are very proud of what we’ve done so far which is probably more than some of us expected.”
Pavlich will speak in Adams Recital Hall at 8 p.m. Thursday evening. There will be a Q&A session following Pavlich’s presentation.
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