Members of The George Washington University’s Young America’s Foundation recently organized and successfully executed an afternoon of GPA redistribution petitioning. Student activists stood outside with clipboards and petitions, asking their peers whether they would support authorizing the Student Association to take GPA points from those students in the top 10 percent of their class and redistribute them to students with GPAs that are below graduation requirements.
Of course, the event was meant to discover whether left-leaning college students are as willing to redistribute their own earnings as they are to redistribute those of other Americans. They aren’t, as it turns out.
The experiment takes an issue that may largely be but an abstract concept in the minds of college students, most of whom do not have incomes, and personalizes it. Student after student refused to sign our petition, declaring “I worked hard for my GPA!” Unsurprisingly, there were quite a few lower-achieving students who were much more eager to sign the petition than their hardworking peers. You can witness the laughably predictable responses for yourself over on Bret Baier’s FoxNews.com blog.
Of course, conservative students have conducted similar experiments many times over on college campuses across the country. Young America’s Foundation actually holds an annual competition to see which school can produce the best video of students’ telling reactions to these petitions. Year after year, GPA redistribution videos have gone viral. The public connects with the logic of these events — they package a tired but important concept in a fresh and accessible way. Students continue to make these videos because they have experienced firsthand the change they can create.
At GW, rarely do our deeply liberal peers ever react positively to our events. But the amount of support we received last week was truly surprising. People really told us they had never considered the issue this way before.
Nevertheless, I was not shocked to discover that The GW Hatchet had elected to publish a highly critical response to the event several days later. I was, however, confused to learn that the author of the piece was a fellow conservative. Even more confusing were her accusations against us. She dismissed the event’s potential persuasiveness by condescendingly quipping, “… it is highly improbable that [students] will change their minds about redistribution of wealth because some students in Kogan [Plaza] dramatically compared it to college students’ GPA” and accused us of being so “histrionic” that we “overshadow the real issues at hand.”
Essentially she argued that our YAF chapter is part of a problem that many moderates believe is central to the overall struggle of the conservative movement: “attempts to persuade through shock.” I can only imagine that she was referring to instances such as Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) filibuster on defunding Obamacare.
As the media is happy to remind us, there’s an ongoing debate among conservatives regarding the most effective way to communicate our values to the American public. By the media’s account, two fundamentally opposing sides have emerged and are currently engaged in a bitter battle over the future of conservatism. Certainly there’s some truth to this. I could write pages on why I disagree with the Hatchet author’s unfair characterization of our event. But who would the real winner be in that scenario? The media.
As Charles Krauthammer explained on Tuesday’s O’Reilly Factor, the media’s depiction of the alleged GOP civil war has people believing that our differences are fundamental and irreconcilable when, in fact, they’re just tactical disagreements. At the end of the day, the author of that Hatchet piece wants to fight redistribution of wealth just as much as the rest of us. Ideologically, we’re on the same page.
And that’s why I was so disappointed in her decision to publicize her criticisms.
There is no question that the liberal GW Hatchet was pleased to post her submission — liberals like nothing more than kicking back and enjoying a good conservative soap opera. But let’s not allow the media to control a dialogue that is central to our success as a movement. Don’t play into their narrative. Relax. Focus on participating in the necessary internal conversations and avoid providing the media with the ammunition they want to use in order to tear us apart.
Personally, I believe that our event was distinctly substantive. To the contrary of the charges of theatricality, GPA redistribution petitions actually confront isolated college-aged students with some sense of the reality that they will face as payers of income taxes. My experience with this event tells me that it’s a powerfully persuasive and highly substantive exercise in critical thinking.
As a fellow conservative, you’re free to take my word for it or not — but maybe just shoot me an email before you alert the media that I’m destroying conservatism. Ultimately, we’ll all be better off for it.
The author is the president of the George Washington University chapter of Young America’s Foundation.
