The University of Wyoming Heterodox Academy hosted a dialogue event on March 25 in the Union basement. This debate involved University faculty and students and spoke on new developments, including the DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion), and Concealed-Carry on Campus.
Sophia Gomelsky and Charles Dean Vaughters were the students who spoke at this event. Gomelsky took the side against concealed carry on campus, while Vaughters took the opposing side. “Starting off with the gun conversation, 65% of the university community actively said they did not support guns on campus. While the Board of Trustees did respect the fact that 90% of UW faculty was opposed to the policy change, The State Legislature took an opposition stance to that. The direction that they don’t care about gun control or what local communities and students and educators are saying,” said Gomelsky.
Vaughters’ rebuttal was, “For a perspective of student choice, in terms of firearms, I was a former active duty marine. I almost didn’t go to the University of Wyoming because the University of Colorado accepts concealed carry. To me, I am a certified, trained with weapons marine. I have that experience, and I absolutely have that ability to get concealed carry. Regardless of what the majority of the student body says, I think I should be able to. If the majority of people want to take that right away from me, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do.” Gomelsky also expressed concerns with suicide rates possibly being raised by having more accessible firearms.
The second topic the students debated was the federal and state effort to terminate the DEI. “The definition of institution discrimination and DEI has become such a national talking point that it basically loses all of its relevance when it gets down to wyoming. I think we, as a university community, do a very good job making sure people aren’t getting discriminated against, and I think that a lot of students would agree to that. It becomes kind of dangerous and scary when we see our legislature say we are going to ban teaching about certain things. Then the next year, they might decide they want to ban teaching about a few more things, and then students will no longer feel like they can express their opinions,” said Gomelsky.
Vaughters then shared a personal story as an example, to combat Gomelsky’s view. “My dad is dating a girl from Sweden, and she has a daughter who is half Swedish and half korean. She wants to go to a university in America. She goes to a well-off London school. She has a lot of friends who are from various rich families in Africa, who also have very similar things. She applied to a lot of universities in the United States, with roughly the same grades, same test scores, same everything. She was rejected because she’s half-white, half-asian. Meanwhile, her African friends were accepted into these universities, because of their race. I don’t think that’s acceptable in any circumstance. I think it should be entirely based on test scores, grades, anything that we can use to measure how well a person is doing. I think that it’s good that all this stuff is being terminated,” Vaughters said.
This event had a lively debate over the DEI and on-campus concealed carry, hosted by the University of Wyoming Heterodox Academy. Faculty also spoke about the policy changes during this event.
