On Jan. 26, the recently established Turning Point USA Club here at Eagle High had a guest speaker come and talk about “feminism” in the auditorium during the lunch hour. It quickly became known that the guest speaker invited by the club, Boise State professor Scott Yenor, was going to talk about his feelings against it.  

Students could foresee the major impact that this man would have on Eagle High’s history, something that could’ve been easily avoided. Soon after, Yenor’s name is one that many have cemented in their minds after the Jan. 26 speech, a speech that many disagreed with. 

“The first thing that comes to mind is anxiety due to what happened that day,” said sophomore Josie Yates. “It affected me by making me almost scared to come to school.” 

Yenor is an author and political science professor at Boise State University, as well as a speaker at many conservative conferences. Yenor’s beliefs, compared to traditional conservative beliefs, are more so on the extreme and controversial side.  

These beliefs of his have gotten him into hot water in the past, leaving many to protest and petition for his job termination at Boise State. 

According to cnn.com, Yenor talked about feminism at an Orlando, Florida conference and said, “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.” 

In his speech on Jan. 26 in the Eagle High Auditorium, Yenor discussed how modern feminism is hurting the United States, saying that a strong country runs on strong families and how feminism destroys that. Yenor spoke about the “modern principles of feminism” and gave five ideas on what he thinks modern feminism is trying to promote.  

Some of the principles he discussed were to “remove sexual taboos” and to “promote incest and pedophilia.” These beliefs outraged many who came to listen to what he had to say, most with an open-minded attitude. 

“I love to learn about others’ opinions, but when they infringe on my rights to pursue a career, it gets scary,” Yates said. “With feminism, it has become such a big argument and people cannot find a common ground.” 

The speech quickly became one that many discussed in anger and annoyance; a speech, due to the reactions of many in the audience, that clearly shouldn’t have happened in the first place.  

“I don’t think that the outrage could’ve been avoided because of how the administration dealt with it – which they didn’t, really,” said junior Mikayla Herrera. “I think that if there was more time and rules, the speech could have been a really important conversation between both sides.” 

Many students didn’t stay long to hear the controversial professor’s speech, with his speech sparking a silent protest. Many students simply got up and left the auditorium, some booing him in the process. 

“From my understanding, [the protest] was supposed to be silent, but it obviously didn’t turn out that way,” Herrera said. “In many colleges, it doesn’t matter who is speaking, if someone is giving a speech and it is interrupted, you can get in trouble.” 

There are always different sides to the story, and not all students who attended the speech were extremely opposing Yenor’s views. There were some who directly supported his views and others who wanted to assess the situation better, staying in the auditorium to listen to the rest of his speech.  

“I found myself agreeing with [what he was saying]. For myself, I would like to have my own family in the future, but I also want to pursue lengthy education,” Herrera said. “If he did say something I didn’t agree with, honestly I probably wouldn’t care that much. It would be just one’s man word that I disagreed with.” 

A while has passed since the speech, but it’s still a topic many students bring up, stating how odd and messy the situation was. The school administration, and even students, can hopefully learn from this situation, with the clear lesson for the administration being to not bring political speech to young, impressionable high school students.  

A lesson that students can take away from the situation is that an open mind is the right way to go about things, and a civil discussion about opposing views is what solves problems, not the yelling and screaming that both sides did plenty of that day.  

This is what should’ve been talked about in the speech, not the beliefs of a controversial figure on what he thinks the ideals of modern feminism is.