Good for Adrian College President Jeffrey Docking!
Riley Gaines will give the commencement address at Adrian College in Michigan. She has been one of the most outspoken advocates for keeping female sports female.
Alumni and students have bashed Docking’s decision, but he won’t back down, unlike numerous colleges have done this year and in the past.
Docking gave Fox News Digital an extensive interview, explaining his decision and the importance of having Gaines speak.
Docking said: “I think that higher-ed leaders need to hold strong right now and not cave in to people that want to crush free inquiry.”
Plus, Adrian College has an extensive athletic department:
Considering the large athlete demographic at Adrian, Docking told Fox News Digital that the issue of trans-athletes in sports is “pertinent” to Adrian College and that the school “believes strongly in Title IX” and respects the work that women put into sports.”To think that those women either here or anywhere else could be subjected to coming out for the first day on the team and being told you don’t have a spot on this team … two or three trans athletes are taking your spot because they’re bigger, stronger, faster, better lung capacity than you. And so you’re out–Just does not seem right to me,” he said.”We made a decision that we are going to bring her in to put this at the forefront,” Docking told Fox News Digital.He explained further hat Adrian College previously invited a trans person to speak on campus in April 2022 on behalf of trans-rights.”So, we’ve had it on both sides,” Docking said. “I do think that free inquiry has been pushed to the side in precisely those institutions, mainly higher education, that should be embracing it.”
Docking also admitted he chose to have Gaines speak at the commencement because “he thought the issue of transgender women in athletics was substantive:”
“She seems to be at the center of the vortex because of her swimming career at Kentucky, and when she realized that she was swimming against a trans athlete, was willing to go public and say, ‘This doesn’t seem fair to me,” and in speaking up she then became the face of that point of view, so she seemed like the most logical person to bring to talk about this,” Docking told Michigan Advance.In the interview with Michigan Advance, Docking added that Adrian was “not endorsing” Gaines’ point of view on the trans-athlete issue when inviting her to speak.”Secondly, I think on college campuses sometimes people debate topics like this. Other times topics like this are presented,” he said.Docking objected to the notion that Gaines’ was too polarizing to speak at Adrian’s spring graduation ceremony.”My feeling is with the amount of tuition that people pay to go to college, whether it’s here or somewhere else, that they should expect to be challenged, presented with thoughtful topics, things that need to be considered from the day they arrive until the day they leave,” Docking told Michigan Advance. “I don’t think that a commencement address is necessarily a time that should be solely focused on just making everybody feel comfortable. I think that making people feel uncomfortable during a commencement address is very consistent with what colleges should be doing.”
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