Wyn Caudle
Co-Chief Editor
Wooster community members and The College of Wooster students gathered at the Learning Garden Pavilion on September 21 at 2 p.m. to host an open discussion about the current political climate. The event, titled “Our Constitution is Under Threat: Speak Out!,” began with three-minute speeches from five select speakers of the Wooster campus and wider community before moving into an open mic format, allowing anyone in the audience to stand up and speak.
In email correspondence with the Voice, Désirée Weber, associate professor of political science, disclosed that the Wooster Advocacy: Defending Democracy group organized the event in collaboration with multiple community and campus groups. The group meets every second and fourth Saturday at 11 a.m. at First Presbyterian Church.
The first speaker was Brian Hoffman, the current director of the Ohio Center for Strategic Immigration Litigation & Outreach (OCSILiO). Hoffman spoke about habeas corpus, a writ ordering a person in custody to be brought before a court that places the burden of proof on those detaining the person to justify the detention. “If you are a Kazakh mercenary and you are detained in Iraq and brought to Guantanamo Bay and designated an alien combatant, you actually have more constitutional rights than a 15-year-old refugee from El Salvador who’s actually been living in the United States for five or 10 years,” Hoffman said.
Next, Lauren Riley ’26, a senior political science major, stepped up, discussing media literacy and surveillance on the internet. “The level of constant feeding of highly opinionated information on the specific side of the political spectrum eliminates outside voices and creates an easily controllable, homogeneous population that erases the democratic ideal of civil disagreement,” Riley said.
Juanita Greene, President of Wooster NAACP, spoke about the importance of empathy and staying educated within the hate in our current political climate. “You have to have the strength to make good decisions,” Greene said. “Our president is not like that. Our president makes his decisions on his personal feelings. He has no empathy towards anybody. He has created an atmosphere of fear and hatred. We are so busy hating people who don’t look like us, or hating them because they are poor or hating them because they are rich, we need to stop doing that.”
Flynn Cowie ’26 took the mic next, discussing the importance of protests and policies that have been implemented within higher education. “Protest thrives most when it emerges directly from human urgency rather than a government sanction,” Cowie said. “At its best, protests come and becomes a collective act of conscious uniting students, faculty, staff, administration, community members, workers and families alike … standing together peacefully to confront justice.”
Evan Riley, associate professor of philosophy, spoke next, bringing up the importance of context regarding political speech and the importance of free speech. “I think we should let the students engage in a more open space when it comes to campus protest, ” Riley said. “One of the things that we owe to our students is the space to explore what you might think of as political protest, but is in fact learning how to do political protest.”
After Riley spoke, Weber introduced the open mic section of the conversation, during which the floor opened to Wooster community members and campus community members to bring up ideas or concerns they would like to discuss. During this time, 18 speakers came to the mic — composed of community members and students alike — discussing personal experiences with the current political environment and thoughts surrounding what action could be taken.
Many students and community members spoke up during this event. “It’s your duty to make a change to make people uncomfortable. There is a lot of power in making people uncomfortable. It should make you uncomfortable that people aren’t talking about the two Black men that were lynched last week, but they are talking about Charlie Kirk. It should make you uncomfortable how little we talk about the thousands who have died in Gaza in the last year alone,” Leo Walsh ’28 said.
The Reverend Walter Clark talked about the importance of love and treating people with respect and equality. “The only way to achieve anything in this world is to feel love for another person. We started with the idea that all men are created equal. We didn’t regard the natives in this land as equal. We didn’t regard the enslaved persons we brought in as equal. We didn’t regard women as equal. As a country, we had to learn how to do that,” Clark said. “The best thing we can do is to love and have empathy radically. It will not be easy.”
Mark Gooch, collection management & discovery services librarian at The College of Wooster and a community member, spoke about the importance of the younger audience stepping and participating in conflict discussion.
“So many of you are young people and I know sometimes it feels difficult that nothing is going our direction, working our way or being addressed. Unfortunately, many issues can take a little bit of time. They don’t get solved instantaneously. But what we need to do is we need to be active. We need to vote. We need to get our friends to vote because without that we end up with what we have right now.”