Indiana State cancels Rich Lowry speaking event after false racism claim

Indiana State University (ISU) recently canceled a speaking engagement featuring Rich Lowry, the editor-in-chief of the National Review, a right-leaning news outlet.

ISU said that the decision to cancel Lowry’s visit was based on “safety concerns” rather than a liberal political agenda, according to a statement shared with WTHI TV.

“It is important to stress that this cancellation is not intended to limit our neutrality on different political viewpoints,” the statement read. “Indiana State University remains firmly committed to fostering intellectual diversity and encouraging the respectful exchange of ideas from multiple perspectives.”

[RELATED: Thomas Jefferson’s image defaced at UVA]

Lowry wrote in a New York Post op-ed that these “safety concerns” related to his appearance on the Megyn Kelly Show, during which he began to mispronounce the word “migrants” while discussing Haitian immigrants and corrected himself mid-word.

“I began to say it with a short ‘i,’ the way you say ‘immigrants,’ instead of the long ‘i’ that you use for ‘migrants.’ I caught myself in the middle, before shifting to the correct pronunciation,” Lowry wrote. “So, I said what you might call the ‘M-word.’”

Lowry expressed concerns that ISU’s decision to cancel his invitation may spell a dim future for free speech, noting that other conservatives who face being “canceled” are not as well-equipped to defend themselves.

“I don’t want to suggest this is anything on the order of what other people have suffered in losing their livelihoods and reputations to cancel culture,” he wrote. “This episode is worth dwelling on, though, because the underlying phenomenon is so pernicious and stupid, and people who don’t have gallons of ink to defend themselves the way I do and don’t work for a conservative organization the way I do are particularly susceptible to this kind of cut-rate McCarthyism.”

[RELATED: NYU student paper yanks ad promoting College Republicans event]

Lowry also objected to the notion that his presence at ISU posed a serious security threat, asserting that any extant safety concerns are reflective of ISU’s culture surrounding diversity of ideas.

“Taking the side of a woke online fringe and giving it what it wants on the basis of an almost certainly nonexistent security threat doesn’t speak to political neutrality. And if there is a real security threat, what does that say about Indiana State University? If the young people under its care and tutelage are liable to storm a lecture hall if I show up, that is an indictment of them, not me.”

Campus Reform has reached out to Rich Lowry and ISU for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.