Assembly: Jeff Jacoby

By Ashley Jiang, Andrew Yuan

Boston Globe conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby spoke at the first mandated Assembly of the school year last Friday at the invitation of the Republican Club, on January 3. Many students were troubled by Jacoby’s political views and rhetoric; however, others saw Jacoby’s conservative perspectives as needed to increase the diversity of the Academy’s political discourse. There was no Q & A offered after Jacoby’s Assembly, which frustrated some students who sought to interrogate Jacoby’s perspectives more.

“The ideal reader I always have in mind is not somebody who agrees with me or somebody who disagrees with me—it's somebody who's willing to consider the point that I make with an open mind,” Jacoby said.

Jacoby’s conservative ideals stem from his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. “As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I figured out early on that one of the deadliest threats in this world is a government that is too powerful, and that one of the greatest blessings of all is freedom,” Jacoby said.

Senior and Republican Club co-head Sarah Kennedy saw inviting Jacoby as supplying a necessary conservative viewpoint in Assembly programming. “I’ve been keeping data on the assembly speakers since I was a freshman because it's a required appointment. We have to be there, and we have never had a conservative speaker,” Kennedy said. “It doesn't make an awful lot of sense to require us to be at something that lacks that kind of diversity, so it's been a long-term goal of mine to have a conservative speaker.”

The Republican Club hoped to invite more conservatives to speak at the Assembly. “The Republican Club asked me to look at a number of conservative speakers,” Assembly Coordinator and English Instructor Alex Myers said. “Every year I put out a request form to clubs to see who they would like to invite–I’m hoping to do that again soon.”

Jacoby’s Assembly caused heated discussion among Academy students.

“The invocation of Anne Frank for political purposes–especially the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day–made me upset,” senior and co-head of Democratic Club Dillon Mims said. “I’m perfectly fine to listen to opinions I disagree with, but when he invoked Anne Frank’s name right after the Holocaust Remembrance Day, it just felt very tactless.”

“I came away from the Assembly really frustrated. The timing of it was completely, completely awful and inconsiderate, with Derek Chauvin’s trial going on at the exact same time,” lower Ophelia Bentley said. “Secondly, with this being the first assembly where attendance is being taken, I also found it very frustrating how little time he was given, because I think I do agree with many people that it is important that we have a range of views, but I found that it meant he wasn't able to expand on many of his ideas, which made me feel very frustrated.”

The assembly was the first formally-required assembly for students this year. “It felt like a slap in the face to have so many sophisticated and distinguished speakers as well as events regarding anti-racism go un-required, unheard, and seen as more unimportant than a speaker who contained highly offensive content in his speech,” Lower Lydia Osei said.

“I was just very surprised that the school decided to invite someone who spread such hateful rhetoric and things that were directly negatively affecting the people within the audience,” upper and Exeter Socialist Union (ESU) co-head Thora Jordt said. “Again, as a setback, it was the first mandatory assembly that felt almost like salt in the wound to the audience with that sort of offense.”

Jacoby drew more criticisms from the Academy community regarding his comments about the founding fathers of America, Ronald Reagan, and abortion policies.

“I think this backlash is less about him having a conservative viewpoint but because he was praising people who were known to having discriminatory policies,” Bentley said. “He not only praised Reagan, but he put the founding fathers and Thomas Jefferson on the pedestal who were slave owners. Thomas Jefferson was a rapist and a very problematic person. Those are not concerted issues. Those are just idolizing some racist and discriminatory people.”

“You can’t ideally worship anybody without recognizing their flaws. We idolized Washington and his country, but a great part of our higher education here at Exeter is recognizing that all people who are our heroes have flaws,” senior and Republican Club co-head Phil Horrigan added. “The action of idolizing Thomas Jefferson is not reflective of someone who will impart good life practices on Exeter campus.”

“I think that the school and the students would be perfectly happy to have a conservative speaker, assuming that the conservative speaker was not saying things that directly attack certain students' identities. If there hadn't been a speaker who praised Reagan and actively said that we should go back to the greatness of the founding fathers, it wouldn't be a problem,” upper and ESU co-head Amelia Scott agreed. “The problem is that he attacked the identity of students of color and LGBTQ+ students.”

“Had he had more time, he would be able to go into a bit more nuanced look of Reagan but because of the time constraint, he wasn’t able to do that,” Bentley added. “As a member of the LGBT community, Jacoby skipped over the way Reagan had handled the AIDS crisis, as if Reagan can be a political idol when he killed hundreds and thousands of people based on his bigotry. Because of the way the speaker was talking about it, he put them up on a pedestal in a way that is really wrong, in my opinion.”

Senior Albert Chu was also concerned with the specific language and tone that Jacoby used. “My initial thoughts when watching the assembly were largely that a lot of the language that he used wasn't very conducive or really open to discussion, and he seemed to paint everything liberals and the left in general said, or acted on as sort of an emotional response or as more of an approach based on emotion, as opposed to results and political practicality, which I thought didn’t really leave a lot of room anywhere for discussion or for actual change.”

Some supporters of the assembly, however, stressed the importance of inviting more conservative speakers to the Assembly stage.

“I was mostly relieved to finally see a conservative speaker. There were also things that I disagreed with him on, but I didn't really think about those immediately,” Prep Colin Jung said. “We should absolutely invite more conservative speakers. As a conservative, my worldview is strengthened every time a liberal speaker shows up and challenges them. Half the liberals on campus are so sheltered from opposing viewpoints that they have absolutely no way to justify their beliefs.”

“Let me be frank. I was a little disappointed with some of the questions that I saw in the chat. As a panelist, I can see some of the questions that were not being allowed to be shown to the school. And those were unfortunately really disappointing,” Kennedy said. “I was upset to see how Exeter students disagree with their opposing views.”

“It might discourage their classmates from sharing dissenting views in class. It would be a real shame because that's what the heart of the Harkness model is based off of. I think that that is definitely a concern of mine after this, but I hope that they opened some minds today,” Kennedy continued.

Osei called for the Academy to issue a response. “I feel as though it would be quite disappointing and surprising to see no response from the school, as there have been extreme reactions from many campus members regarding the content of Jeff Jacoby’s messages,” Osei said.

Prep Juno Cowans expressed his own discontent at the student reaction to the assembly. “Mostly liberal voices would shut me down and that's not productive to anything, definitely not productive to a good discourse and therefore I need to find people I agree with,” Cowans said. “And so we just sit on opposite ends of the spectrum which just makes it more polarizing.”

Other students believed that the assembly reaction wasn’t attributed to the “left-leaning bias” at Exeter, but rather to a disagreement with Jacoby on his fundamental values that extended beyond politics.

“I'm not necessarily criticizing him for being a conservative. I’m mainly criticizing him for the way that he spoke. This speaker openly said that liberals make decisions off of feelings or conservatives use facts in their brain. Isn’t that conservative bias?” Mims said.

To address claims of left-leaning bias in the Academy, Mims said: “All politics is constituted of bias. The only unbiased people are people who don't know anything about politics or policy. I understand that Exeter as an institution does not really have political leanings. It’s just the students that either lean to the left or the right. I don’t think that the bias claim has much merit.”

Chu added, “If Jacoby’s actually looking to change hearts and minds, and win people over to his point of view, or just to win people over to what people see as conservative thought, you will have a thought that that is not a helpful approach either because everybody is going to look at them and go ‘that doesn't leave room for anybody.’ That is sort of an ineffective at best and maybe outright hostile at worst approach to actually functional productive discourse.”

In response to the difference between the community reaction towards liberal and conservative speakers, Horrigan denied the existence of a “left-leaning bias.”

“The Academy was not particularly accepting of Roxane Gay, right? A lot of people didn’t agree with her, and her talking point that really stuck around was that OMA [Office of Multicultural Affair] leaders should be paid, which caused a lot of controversy,” Horrigan said. “There was a lot of conversation from the circles that I live in about this issue that Roxane Gay brought up and supported.”

Horrigan ultimately believed that the negative reaction to Jacoby’s Assembly did not stem from intolerance of conservative speakers. “This idea that conservative speakers are being challenged because they are conservatives isn’t correct,” Horrigan said. “Especially because we are not criticizing Jacoby because he’s a conservative, but because he made inappropriate references.”