Reverse Q&A Tour

Today I am announcing a college and university Reverse Q&A tour! In April, I’ll be visiting universities throughout the United States, but instead of being in front of students and lecturing, I’ll be in the audience listening and asking questions about student experiences with Critical Social Justice (also called “Wokeism”). We’ll delve into questions like: What role does Social Justice play in your education and what role do you want it to play? Do you feel you can say what you believe in your classrooms? What opinions can’t be voiced?  Do your professors have an ideological agenda? What is that agenda? What happens when you question it?

In March of 2020, I did a pilot Reverse Q&A event at Portland State University that you can see here. The results were not surprising—I heard a scathing indictment of indoctrination masquerading as education that was deeply disturbing on multiple levels. My team and I have taken key lessons from that event that will improve the forthcoming Reverse Q&A tour. Namely, we’ll be showing one of two films at the beginning of each event: either select episodes from Travis Brown’s The Woke Reformation or Mike Nayna’s yet untitled forthcoming film about Grievance Studies and the corruption of scholarship. (Mike’s film has been delayed due to Covid.) This will help set the mood and ease people into conversation.

We have partnered with student groups like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s nonpartisan AHA Foundation and we are looking to partner with additional student groups that will cosponsor a Reverse Q&A at their campus. The Reverse Q&A series is about platforming students and looking more thoughtfully at the ideology that currently dominates our academic institutions, it is not about conservatism, liberalism, Republicanism, etc. If you’re a member of a student group and you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please leave your contact info in the comments below, or email my assistant Eris erisapple@protonmail.com. (I am waiving my speaking fee and the event must be free and open to all.) We are filming the tour and will release a documentary of our conversations to the public.

We’ve set up an Indiegogo fundraiser and you can see the trailer here:

We need approximately $110K and that’s all at federal per diems. Here’s the budget:

This project is important because people—tuition payers, tax payers, faculty members, parents, etc.—need to understand what is being taught in universities and the chilling atmosphere it is creating. If I tweet or post here about illiberalism or censoriousness, that is not nearly enough. The world needs to hear students’ authentic voices. There’s something incredibly powerful about those testimonials which have the potential to act as a change agent.

Perhaps, however, I am wrong. Maybe students really enjoy Critical Social Justice ideology and want it to play a fundamental role in their education. Or perhaps they think it’s necessary to censor others, or maybe even think there is no censorship. At the Reverse Q&As, students advocating any position will be welcome to speak, so in just a few months we will have a candid glimpse of what students really think about their education.