Republican South Carolina Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and her legislative allies are on a quest to ensure colleges in the state never again retaliate against a scheduled speaker due to their political views.
The lieutenant governor made headlines when South Carolina State University (SCSU) canceled her scheduled May 8 commencement address citing safety concerns following left-wing student protests citing her stance against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), among other issues. The school’s decision to disinvite the Republican prompted a group of conservative South Carolina lawmakers to call to strip a $5 million taxpayer-funded grant for SCSU’s convocation center.
Evette is a leading GOP candidate in South Carolina’s open gubernatorial race and is endorsed by both President Donald Trump and term-limited Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster. She told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview that she supports the lawmakers’ effort.
“Any institution that gets and receives state taxpayer dollars that tries to stop conservative speech, we must take their money away, their state money,” the lieutenant governor said. “That’s all we control. We must take their state money away. Full stop.”
The student protesters cited the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s opposition to DEI, her pro-life stance on abortion, her support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and alliance with Trump. Evette has continually referred to these students as a “woke mob.” SCSU is South Carolina’s only public historically black four-year university.
Republican South Carolina State Rep. Melissa Lackey Oremus, one of the lawmakers spearheading the effort to pull the convocation funding, told the DCNF in an interview that “while we can’t run the school and the state at the same time, we can be vocal about what they can and can’t do with state funds.”
Oremus led a June 1 letter to budget conference committee members calling for the removal of the $5 million earmark toward the convocation center.
“[W]e are asking that this item not be included in the conference report to send a strong signal that free speech at state funded institutions of higher education will not be prevented,” Oremus and her fellow Republicans wrote.
“It is a horrible example and precedent when a publicly funded university caves in to the wishes of a few students to cancel a speaker and limits the right of an entire student body to hear the words of someone just because they don’t like the politics of that person,” the letter added. “This cannot be tolerated.”
South Carolina’s lawmakers are in the process of finalizing the state budget which is set to go into effect July 1, WLTX reported.
Evette told the DCNF that a representative from SCSU called her office in December 2025 and asked if she would be the university’s commencement speaker the following May, leading her to accept.
“Not a whole lot of anything really happened from December until all of this broke loose just about a month ago,” she added.
The man who led the charge to ask Evette to speak at the university’s commencement was Douglas Gantt, chairman of the SCSU Board of Trustees, according to Oremus. The lawmaker said that Gantt, who is black, is a Republican.
Evette said the student protest “started as kind of a sit-in” but escalated to “a lot of angry protesters saying a lot of things.” She noted that she was getting “a lot of really disturbing messages” via social media and email.
SCSU then called Evette’s “attorneys in the governor’s office and basically said they were going to have to rescind the invitation, citing safety concerns,” the lieutenant governor told the DCNF. “I was just flabbergasted, because every convention speech I give talks about this amazing country we live in.”
The school’s National Alumni Association President Yolanda Williams and Student Government Association President Zaria Tucker ended up giving the May 8 keynote commencement address in the Republican’s place.
She noted that the speech she was planning to give did not mention DEI, ICE, Trump, or any of the other issues the student protesters cited in voicing their opposition to her. Instead, Evette said she was going to speak “about the fact that my grandparents were immigrants, and my dad was a tool and die maker and … if you work hard and you follow your dreams, you can be whatever you want to be.”
“It is not like it was ever going to be a political talk,” Oremus said. “She wasn’t going to be like, ‘Oh, I’m MAGA’ or this, or anything like that. It’s basically inspirational to inspire them to the next level. Do your best, be the best you can be.”
“I think my story is a great story to tell,” Evette told the DCNF. “I didn’t inherit anything. I worked really hard. I grew a very successful national company in the private sector and now serve as lieutenant governor. And I was just shocked that that wasn’t a message they felt was worth hearing, because what they did say was that I was pro-life and I was pro-Trump and I was anti-DEI, I was pro law enforcement and pro-ICE, and that’s why they didn’t want me there.”
“We all want to see them thrive and educate our children the best. But if you’re going to educate our children and indoctrinate our children, we don’t send our kids to college to be indoctrinated. We encourage them to be free thinkers and be exposed to a lot of different things,” she said. “And this is the kind of thing that we’re stopping right now.”
Evette has also been a vocal proponent of ending tenure for university professors for the past several months. In her April 29 statement immediately following SCSU’s decision to disinvite her, she said the “root problem is professors who gin up feigned outrage to the detriment of their students, whom they should be teaching to think critically. End tenure now!”
She similarly advocated for ending tenure in a September 2025 op-ed for The Post and Courier written shortly after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk on a college campus. Multiple professors and teachers had celebrated or spoke favorably about the conservative activist’s violent murder.
“After the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, I was very direct to the media when I said we should stop tenure on college campuses, because there were so many professors saying so many disgusting things after a human being had just been murdered,” Evette told the DCNF. “So many were saying, ‘Well, these professors have tenure, our hands are tied, or our options are limited.’ It’s like, well, then we should … just do away with that.”
“Conservative speech has got to be protected everywhere, and I feel like you know what I hear from students, and what I hear from parents, and what I’ve heard from my own children is that if you are on a college campus and you are a conservative thinker, you basically have to hide that side of you,” she said.
Evette expressed the need for “consequences” when asked what her plans were to stop the censorship of dissenting views on college campuses if elected the Palmetto State’s next governor.
“If you receive state taxpayer dollars, then you have to do the right thing, and you have to allow really free speech,” she said. “And that means no matter what you think, conservative or not. And so, I don’t think it would take long for everybody to realize that the state means business.”
“I just think that we’re going to send a very good message to all institutions that you have to do the right thing, you have to do the right thing for all students, not just a portion of the students that sit on your campus,” she added, referring to the effort backed by Oremus and her colleagues.
Oremus told the DCNF that with regard to free speech, “everybody’s all on board until it’s the opposite viewpoint, but we can’t be that way.”
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