So five governors walk into a room, and…

This isn’t the set-up for a joke: it really happened this week at the Bipartisan Policy Center.  Over an hour-long lunch, the students shared insights and questions with five former governors about free speech on high school and college campuses.  (They also traded thoughts on the week’s most captivating headline: the Brett Kavanaugh controversy.)

The meeting happened at the request of BPC’s Governors Council, the members of whom met and loved last spring’s students a public event.  Two of the Governors (Jim Douglas, Republican from Vermont, and Christine Gregoire, Democrat from Washington) shared states with current SEGL students; the others were Mike Beebe, Democrat from Arkansas, Steven Beshear, Democrat from Kentucky, and David Heineman, Republican from Nebraska.

The conversation was robust and entertaining, with all the governors speaking off the record on a variety of topics.  (One student asked a particularly memorable question about a home school’s refusal to allow student discussion on a particular topic: the governors’ response was unanimous and bipartisan.)  Afterwards, there was time for one-on-one follow-ups, before the students headed back for one of the semester’s major deliverables: a speechwriting Master Class with Lissa Muscatine (more on that later!).