University Prep’s Social Justice day featured many prominent tracks appealing to people of many identities. One track this year caught many peoples eye however: Non-Liberal Leadership to a Better World. 

UPrep is known to be a primarily liberal school. UPrep is very open and inclusive to the LGBTQ community and openly supports ideas such as freedom of religion, racial equality and gender equality. 

All of these factors lead to a very inclusive community, representing and respecting those who have had more struggles gaining representation. Conservatism, however, has had much less open representation.

“Since UPrep has a super liberal bias to it, one of the main goals of our track is to expose a lot of people to a different point of view that isn’t as commonly portrayed at our campus, or isn’t seen as the best thing, although it’s just another point of view,” sophomore and track leader Jack Houlihan said.

The track was split into two parts. The first part of the day was based around a panel of student parents, sharing their conservative perspective and answering questions.

“We only have student parents on the panel, so that’s going to be my dad [John Houlihan] and Henry Buscher’s parents [Geoffrey and Belinda Buscher]” Houlihan said.

During the second half of the day, the Non-Liberal Leadership track shifted focus closer to an open discussion track. Discussion leaders such as Latham Britton, Henry Busher and David Abramowitz offered a place for controlled debates in a more conservative friendly space.

“We introduced a bunch of different topics from gun rights to immigration, and some were a lot easier to debate than others. We talked about mainstream media bias and got very little discussion, whereas we talked about gun rights and gun restriction and had almost a 30-minute debate, so it really just depend on the topic,” Britton said.

There is currently a meeting space for those who identify with more conservative views, the Conservative and Centrist Politics club. Many aspects of the club helped influence the creation of the Social Justice Day track.

“The Non-Liberal Leadership track is an outgrowth of the conservative and centrist discussion club that we have and that was founded because a lot of kids here and adults too were feeling like they were not being heard. I think what we really want, to the degree that I can speak for other people, is to be recognized as a diversity within the community. We don’t expect people to come around to our ideas, nor should we be expected to come around to anyone else’s,” history teacher and discussion leader Gus Feliu said. “Our reflection here is that people here do want to engage with ideas that are different from their own” he said.