By Darren Mcvey

Way back during the Freshmen Orientation of 2004, I had the pleasure of hearing Professor Phil Laemmle’s famous “Biscuit Speech.” Laemmle was a great teacher and great man who made a positive impact in the lives of numerous students. His annual Biscuit Speech, delivered at freshmen orientation, was about how college freshmen are young and stupid, but by listening to folks like him, they could fix it together. By the results he produced, this is undoubtedly a true assertion.

The overall lesson of Laemmle’s speech was helpful to any freshmen who were listening. However, great men can say foolish things even amidst ideas of great wisdom.

I remember the Biscuit Speech vividly, and one part disturbs me even more today than the day I heard it. Laemmle said college students are of the age at which society is most forgiving. Therefore, to paraphrase, they should drink, party, have fun and screw up because they won’t have such liberty in five years.

The moment those words hit me I felt a foreign discomfort. My entire preceding life, adults had been telling me decisions have consequences and a young man must be careful to always make the right decisions. And I tended to agree with them even at my adolescent level of wisdom. Now, Laemmle is telling me it is ok to get a little carried away and make a mistake here or there.

With all due respect to Laemmle and much respect is due, this is the kind of advice that ruins lives. It only takes one drunken hook-up to get an STD. It only takes one drinking session too many to kill someone because you shouldn’t really have been driving.

While I know without a doubt Laemmle meant well with his comment, it is an excellent example of why college students must be on guard so their values are not corrupted.

In the course of a college education, a student will be faced with countless ideas which conflict with his existing value system. Most students feel pressure to bend their values to the curriculum because of the impression professors are smarter than they are and know better than their parents did.

Some ideas are valuable and important, but students must not buy everything their professors are selling. Though this example deals with keeping one’s moral compass intact, students must also keep their intellectual compass intact.

This is the duty of the serious college student. Students have a responsibility to confront the issues facing them in the classroom. Students must seek out alternative sources of information and consider viewpoints from multiple sources.

It is easy to adopt whatever worldview is peddled to one in their liberal arts courses, but the serious college student must think for himself and draw his own conclusions. He must base his opinions on all available information while considering the values he came to college with. It is no secret the influence of the university is to pull students to the left on the political and moral spectrum. If that is the conclusion a student comes to, fine. But if a student is led there by half-truths, propaganda and errors of omission, then it is the student’s fault he allowed himself to be swayed in such a way.

Diversity of ideas should be valued at the university and the only way that can exist is with the presence of free-thinking and truly open-minded students. U of L’s student body comes from all over the world and it does no service to ignore great ideas whether they come from Versailles, France or Versailles, Kentucky.

Instead of diversity of skin pigment or birthplace, let’s strive for diversity of ideas at our university. It is your duty, freshmen, to make sure intellectual diversity is happening here.