An outrage among liberals at a Kansas technical school pressured administrators to cancel plans for Ivanka Trump to give a virtual commencement speech to graduates.
Administrators at Wichita State University and WSU Tech announced the decision late Thursday, just hours after they had announced that the president’s daughter would be speaking to WSU Tech graduates. Administrators of both universities, which are affiliated, said Saturday’s graduation for the technical university would be “refocused” on students, with a nursing graduate as the only speaker.
Critics rushed to the senior White House aide’s defense and called the move a surrender to an “angry liberal mob.”
Ivanka responded to the cancellation in a tweet —
Our nation’s campuses should be bastions of free speech. Cancel culture and viewpoint discrimination are antithetical to academia.
Listening to one another is important now more than ever!https://t.co/VW6W8TIL9c
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 5, 2020
The tweet included a link to her video of her telling the students who finished their degrees amid a global pandemic, “You are a wartime graduate,” and that their training has prepared them “for exactly this moment.”
The announcement that the president’s daughter would speak drew immediate criticism, led by Jennifer Ray, associate professor of photo media at Wichita State, who sent a letter demanding school administrators to cancel the speech. It circulated on social media and garnered 488 signatures from faculty, students, and alumni before the speech was canceled, The Wichita Eagle reported.
While noting that Wichita State does not have administrative control over WSU Tech, Ray claimed having Ivanka speak would taint both institutions and be an insult to the school’s minority students.
“We owe it to our students to stand up for the right thing when and where we can,” Ray wrote. “To our students of color, and to me, inviting Ivanka Trump to speak right now sends the message that WSU Tech does not take diversity seriously.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, who joined Ivanka Trump on the trip to the Wichita State facility, stood up for the senior White House aide.
Estes said in a statement that he was “disappointed.”
“As Kansas faces many challenges recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic to get back to our booming economy,” he said, “Now is the time for us to be working together.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article