Good riddance, Mike Rao

On behalf of the Central Michigan University community, I would like to thank VCU for ridding us of Michael Rao.

During Rao’s tenure as president, CMU went from a mainstream institution that reflected the values and beliefs of the taxpayers who fund it to a school that caters to the radical left.

As the VCU community will soon find out, its new president will not be a friend to traditionalist Virginians. Get ready for endless programs aimed at “enhancing cultural diversity on campus”-which are code words for state-sponsored racism, according to U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Falls Church.

Rao isolated Christians and traditionalists by promoting secular progressive policies and initiatives that will be as out of place in Southern Virginia as they were in Mount Pleasant, Mich.

Instead of receiving a classic liberal arts education centered on Western civilization, Rao and his cronies indoctrinated students with a secular progressive philosophy instead of creating a marketplace of ideas-allowing students to hear all voices and perspectives.

And speaking of voices, CMU students were bombarded by Rao with a steady flow of left-of-center speakers. For the last five years, hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money were used by Rao to bring pornographer Ron Jeremy, propagandist Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Black Panther activist and self-described communist Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, who trained kids to build bombs to overthrow the government, Wesley Clark, Joe Wilson, Morris Dees, and a parade of other non-mainstream speakers.

Campus Conservatives, and not the university, sponsored many of the conservative speakers brought to campus to counter the leftist orthodoxy during this time, such as speakers John Stossel, Andrew Roberts and David Horowitz.

Setting aside the indoctrination that occurred under Rao, there were alarming instances of unconstitutional restrictions on student rights.

There was a policy that prohibited belief-based student organizations from preventing students who didn’t share the same beliefs from becoming members. Rao wanted to force anti-abortion groups to allow anti-abortion rights students, and Christian groups to allow satanic worshipers.

Rao even stood by his cronies when I was banned from videotaping anyone on campus without express permission after periodically videotaping Rep. Gary Peters, who was a professor running for office at the time.

While Rao might come off as a nice chap with an impressive record, the truth can be found in his record-a record that will surprise the good people of Virginia. As non-profit legal foundation the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports, “Central Michigan University has a red-light rating for censoring student speech.”

Nevertheless, thank you VCU. CMU finally will take a step in the right direction after years of a campus environment that belongs in the liberal bastions of San Francisco and Berkeley.

Editor’s note: Dennis Lennox, a resident of Topinabee, Mich., is the former president of Campus Conservatives. He is a senior at CMU.