EXCLUSIVE: Student Senate funds $3,225 Pridefest, $400 Drag Queen. Petitions School for D.E.I.

 The William and Mary Student Senate has passed a variety of woke and anti-American legislation that petitions the administration to implement D.E.I. policies on campus. Notably, the Student Assembly, of which the Senate is a major part, is responsible for allocating $750,000 in William and Mary’s funding. 

The just passed “Pride Month Act” implements an April “Pride Month” which culminates with a $3,225 “Pridefest” that includes a $400 Drag Performer and $200 worth of pronoun pins, not to mention a $300 bouncy house. The act complains about William and Mary’s “negligence” in enthusiastically supporting the “LGBTQIA+ community.” 

April is, of course, the month of Easter, and the Student Senate has clearly chosen to call for the implementation of this new Pride Month celebration during the most holy and sacred time for Christians on campus. The Wren Journal invites them to make a different liturgical calendar. 

Another movement of the Student Senate is the passing of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Course Resolution, which calls on faculty to consider the “principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion as it pertains to the academic experience, classroom culture, and engagement and interaction with students.” The Student Senate is calling for the William and Mary Administration to throw away all Federal grant money by resisting President Trump’s executive order on D.E.I. 

Furthermore, the resolution “calls on the William and Mary administration to assess the inclusivity of the classroom environment and to acknowledge the presence of discrimination, microaggressive behaviors, racism, and any actions that have a negative impact on fostering inclusivity.” Hidden under a thin veneer of inclusivity is a draconian demand to police and control the speech, and therefore thought, of students and professors alike. Professors, staff, and teaching assistants are then forced to “undergo training on implicit bias” for the explicit purpose of re-education.

To further this chilling effect, the Assembly is recommending that each and every student report be “thoroughly investigate[d] [to] address educational practices not meeting William and Mary’s educational standards.” Students are encouraged to inform on their professors for wrongthink, limiting the academic and intellectual freedom of the classroom environment, and forcing them, lest they be subjected to a kafkaesque process, to discern if “appropriate measures of accountability and restorative practices” are warranted. 

As if this invasive ideological purity testing of professors and deputizing students as informers wasn’t far enough, the Student Assembly has also called on the administration to continue its illegal and unethical policy of “prioritizing hiring diverse faculty, TAs, and staff at all levels of scholarship and administration.”

For too long, the William and Mary Student Assembly has gone without any editorial accountability. If the Student Assembly can enact anti-American policies with a relatively small portion of their total budget, we can only imagine how much more damage they can do with the massive coffers they administer. The Wren Journal calls on the William and Mary Administration to condemn any resolution that calls for the college to go against the federal mandates set by the President. The Student Assembly wields an enormous amount of power, and that power must be used rightly. While much of this type of woke activism has started to be rooted out from colleges across the country, that does not mean that it is entirely gone. Regular, conservative students need to be vigilant, and they need to be bold.

If any reader is interested in reading these resolutions in full, they are linked in a Google Drive folder below.

Wren Drive

Update: the Wren Journal has confirmed that Pridefest is scheduled for Good Friday.