The scheduling of Vice President Mike Pence as the Pope-Shade Lecturer in February 2026 has begun to elicit internet protestations that reveal a number of commendable passions and some misunderstandings about the roles and processes of campus speakers.
An invitation to speak on campus is not an endorsement of that speaker by the University. With the exception of the commencement speaker, whom I select, guest lecturers and performers are selected by faculty/staff committees or academic departments. The senior leadership does not influence those decisions, but we strive to provide institutional support to assure these events are as successful as possible.
Tuition dollars are not used to support lectures or cultural events. The Student Government Association (SGA) allocates some student-activity funds to support their campus events, but the remainder of the speakers and performers who visit our campus are funded through endowments or other gifts.
As a living-learning community, we can’t become an echo chamber. We need to hear voices with which we disagree to broaden our world views and to sharpen our own perspectives and arguments.
As I said at this year’s opening convocation:
We have to be willing to ask difficult questions, we need to listen to countervailing voices and consider different perspectives, and we need to realize that we are not always right.
To do the right thing, we must also acknowledge that a legitimate, healthy diversity of ideas does not mean that every position or conclusion deserves equal billing or any billing at all.
This is the foundation of the academy: we observe, we hypothesize, we research, we experiment, and we subject our conclusions to repeated peer review. The Latin word for science, scientia means knowledge, those things we know through testing and review.
Scientia is knowing what is, and what is not. Anyone has the right to believe the sun revolves around the earth, but as a community of scholars, we should and do reject that uninformed view, but wholesale rejection of ideas because we don’t like them undermines academic freedom and threatens society.
During the past 8-plus years, we have hosted a wide range of speakers. A few were truly inspiring, most were meaningful and informative, a handful were disappointing. I agreed with many, wrestled with many more, and was offended by a handful. That’s how it should be. We almost always learn more from those whose views differ from our own. It is how we stretch our worldview and/or strengthen our resolve. That is the nature of an academic community.
In the 1980s, Senator Jesse Helms led an attack on the National Endowment of the Arts, noting that throughout its then 20-plus-year history, out of tens of thousands of sponsored projects, fourteen had sparked controversy. I penned an op-ed at the time bemoaning how few controversies there had been. Arts (and speakers) are supposed to make us challenge or affirm our beliefs and our boundaries.
The committees that assemble Susquehanna’s offerings each year reflect on what we have seen and heard over the previous few years, and they think about what we will learn individually and collectively from the visitors they bring to campus. When they have done their job well, some of us may be thrilled, some may be outraged, and all of us should become a little wiser.