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Dear Editor,
My name is Evan Honeyman. I am writing in response to Melissa Hector’s article and Dan Merica’s op-ed piece published in the October 22, 2009 edition of the Vanguard. I’d like to start by letting you know who I am as a person: I served as class president for four years in high school and worked on the Connecticut State Student Advisory Council on Education. I’ve been extensively involved in community service and have been recognized by organizations such as: Elk’s Club, Rotary Club, Lion’s Club and United Way of Southington, Inc. I founded my local youth group: Teens With A Cause. In November 2007, I led an effort to send 200 packages to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008, I created a project that sent over $20,000 of medical supplies to a village in Ghana.
However, over the past few weeks, some faculty members and students have attempted to demonize me because I, and many of my classmates, walked out of Tim Wise’s speech. Was our reaction immature? No: we exercised our fundamental Constitutional right to free expression.
Tim Wise was hired to speak to us about diversity, but instead, he delivered a political rant that was totally inappropriate in an official university event meant to bring the student body together. It has been claimed that I am trying to make this a political issue, but Mr. Wise is the one who made it a point to highlight his political views which he attempted to legitimize by delivering them in the context of a university-mandated presentation.
Critics of my classmates’ response to Mr. Wise refuse to listen to our viewpoint. They, and some members of the administration have tried to suppress our views, and call us cowards for refusing to speak in a supposedly “open forum” during which I was singled out and personally attacked. The “forum” however was never meant for critics of Mr. Wise. Instead, its purpose was to demonize his critics, something totally inappropriate in an academic setting. During the forum, attendees praised whoever had shut down the “Boycott Tim Wise” Facebook group, but fell silent when they found out that I had actually shut it down due to the hate speech coming from his supporters.
Here is Tim Wise’s e-mail response to me, conveniently left out of both Dan Merica’s and Melissa Hector’s articles: “…should I just bow to your superior 18 year old wisdom? If you cannot handle ideas that you disagree with, such that you have to walk out, then you are not ready for college. Perhaps you should have remained home schooled or something…” You can draw your own conclusion about his level of professionalism from his response. But the fact remains: in this country, we have the right to dissent. I did not scream, yell or disrupt—I simply stood up and walked out.
As a freshman, I expect Bentley to adhere to its Student Handbook guarantee of free expression and support free speech on campus, not suppress or shut it down. It is cowardly and unethical to attack an individual from behind officially-sanctioned pages of a newspaper and forum, presenting baseless charges and presenting only half the story. I want to tell the entire Bentley community that my classmates and I are fully prepared to fight for free expression and the right to disagree on this campus.
Evan Honeyman
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