COMMENTARY: Rooted in first principles, these students are reshaping campus debates through moral courage rather than outrage.
There is a new kind of radical on college campuses today, and they look nothing like what we have come to expect.
They are not barricading buildings or shouting down speakers. They are not demanding the overthrow of institutions or vilifying those who disagree with them. Instead, they are challenging institutional decisions and the dominant culture of their peers while living according to their deepest Christian beliefs.
Here are some of their stories.
Lucy Spence, a junior at the University of Notre Dame, has been vocal in opposing the university’s appointment of a professor who advocates for abortion to direct one of its academic institutes. The appointment was “astonishing coming from a university dedicated to the mother of an unplanned pregnancy,” she wrote in the main campus newspaper. “Until it begins to defend the sanctity of all life — mother and baby alike — in all of its actions, Notre Dame can never hope to fulfill the singular duty it bears to its female students as Our Lady’s University.”
Spence and many of her classmates were part of a movement urging the
