Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer could visit the Syracuse University campus next spring.

SU’s College Republicans hope to host a speaking event featuring Spicer in late March or early April that would be “open to everyone,” said Rody Conway, president of the organization. College Republicans is still in the process of booking Spicer, he said, and the organization has not yet confirmed that Spicer will be speaking.

“We’re still in the process of coordinating with Sean Spicer’s people,” Conway said. “We needed to get the funding before we could offer an invitation. So, we still don’t know with 100% certainty that’s going to happen.”

Student Association’s Finance Board provided $23,000 to the College Republicans to host Spicer as part of SA’s spring semester allocations. The Assembly voted to approve the allocations at its Nov. 4 meeting.

The Finance Board chose to fund the event because the amount the College Republicans requested fell within the guidelines for an organization of their tier, said Stacy Omosa, SA comptroller. Omosa said the Finance Board is politically neutral and strives to represent all student groups on campus.

“The Finance Board funds all student activities and we cater to all communities on campus,” Omosa said. “The College Republicans submitted an application that was correct, so we decided to cater to this community to give them Sean Spicer.”

Any funds SA allocates must be used in the semester they’re allocated toward. Some details of the event, including the speaker, may be modified with permission from the Finance Board.

If the College Republicans don’t use the allocated funds to host Spicer or a similar speaker, the funds they received will return to SA as rollover funds for the next semester, Omosa said.

Since resigning from his position as Trump’s press secretary in July 2017, Spicer has rebranded himself as a public speaker through the lecture agency Worldwide Speakers Group. He is also a former contestant of “Dancing with the Stars.”

“We wanted to do a bigger, well-known speaker,” said Conway. “Somebody who could get people in the door.”

The Finance Board also denied a $6,000 request by the College Republicans to host conservative political commentator Michael Knowles. The College Republicans appealed the Finance Board’s decision not to fund the event. Omosa said the Finance Board had denied the appeal at Monday’s SA meeting.

“The College Republicans haven’t had significant programming in the past,” Omosa said. “We know that having Sean Spicer for $20,000 is a lot to handle, so we wanted to see if they could handle that big of an event.”

Inviting Knowles to speak was contingent upon receiving funding from SA, Conway said. However, he still believes the College Republicans could have managed both events had they received funding.

Knowles came under fire in September for calling teen climate activist Greta Thunberg “a mentally ill Swedish child” on a Fox News program. A University of Missouri-Kansas City student attacked Knowles during a speech in April titled “Men are not Women,” which some students said was anti-transgender, Inside Higher Ed reported.

“We were well aware that Michael Knowles is a controversial speaker,” Conway said. “He encourages people to come to the front of the pew who disagree with him. We took that into account when we decided to apply for funding.”

Omosa said they would have been open to funding an event featuring Knowles, but it would not have been the Finance Board’s responsibility to weigh the risks of having him on campus.

SU’s College Democrats chapter did not request any funding from the Finance Board for the spring semester. The organization doesn’t have any speakers planned for the spring and is focusing on their upcoming debate with the College Republicans, said Emma Peca, the organization’s communications director.

“We would like to take advantage of SA funding, but typically it is hard to plan that far in advance,” Peca said.

Whether or not they can bring Spicer to campus this spring, the College Republicans hope to invite more conservative figures to speak at SU in the future, Conway said. He referenced Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator and founder of the conservative news website “The Daily Wire,” as someone the College Republicans would be interested in inviting to campus.

“Our eye has generally been towards expansion the past few months,” Conway said. “We think that bringing speakers and adding to the political dialogue on campus is part of that.”

Staff writer Maggie Hicks contributed reporting to this story.

Published on November 12, 2019 at 10:10 pm

Contact Chris: [email protected]