Category Archives: Individual rights

Kiersten Hening on the soccer field. Photo credit: Virginia Tech athletics

by James A. Bacon

In five years, the United States has gone from a country in which football quarterback Colin Kaepernick fought for the right to kneel during the national anthem into a country where Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening is fighting for the right to stand.

During their opening match in 2020, women of the Tech women’s soccer team bent the knee during the pregame reading of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s unity pledge, a show of support for the social justice movement and Black Lives Matter. Hening, a 21-year-old native of the Richmond area, and one other player remained standing. Hening says she “supports social justice and believes black lives matter” but “does not support the BLM organization.”

Chugger Adair. Photo credit: Free Lance-Star

During halftime, Coach Chugger Adair berated her for her stance. “He singled her out and verbally attacked her, pointing a finger directly in her face,”  according to a lawsuit Hening subsequently filed. “He denounced Hening for ‘bitching and moaning,’ for being selfish and individualistic, and for ‘doing her own thing,”

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If you’re not woke, you’re a fascist.

by James A. Bacon

Victoria Spiotto was brought up in a conservative, religious family of Italian descent in Loudoun County.  It was at the University of Virginia where she found her political identity as a conservative. One day in her third year, she was walking the grounds when she came across a Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) table displaying a 9/11 memorial. She found the club appealing, and started learning about thinkers to whom she’d never been exposed to before — the philosophers and thought leaders of conservatism. By her fourth year, she was leader of the club, determined to grow the organization.

Conservatives are mostly invisible at UVa, and they have few means of connecting. Spiotto wanted to let people know the group was out there, that YAF was a club where students of a conservative/libertarian stripe could find like-minded people and make friends. So, she began organizing a series of initiatives to get noticed. “It wasn’t a call to fight.” The idea, she says, was to “stand your ground. Don’t compromise on the truth you believe in.”

YAF now may be the most vilified student organization at UVa. The hostility is unrelenting. Spiotto and her buddies don’t worry for their physical safety. But left-wing students take down their signs and rain down vitriol on social media. Student Council leaders stifle dissent. Continue reading →

by James A. Bacon

I have long thought of Virginia Tech as the most tolerant of free speech and expression among Virginia’s larger universities. There have been minor eruptions of cancel culture, but nothing as debilitating as the examples we’ve documented elsewhere. Looks like I was wrong.

Speech First, a nonprofit group working to combat free speech restrictions in higher-ed, has filed a lawsuit in the Roanoke federal district court, charging that the administration has created a series of “content-restricting policies and processes that allow the university to police and censor speech they deem ‘biased’ or ‘unwanted.'”

According to the Speech First press release, the lawsuit challenges four specific policies that chill student speech: the University’s discriminatory-harassment policy, its bias-related incidents, its computer policy, and a requirement that students obtain administrative approval to distribute flyers. Continue reading →