Student Spotlight - Stacey Wyble

In one short year, Stacey Wyble has gone from being a woman with strong convictions to being a woman with strong convictions who knows how to apply them! After an intense visit to the D.C. area this January to attend a Women's Activism Seminar at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, Stacey charged back to her campus intent on doing "something big."

That "something big" was to bring the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute's conservative woman speaker, Kate Obenshain, to her college campus – La Roche College in western Pennsylvania. Upon her return, however, she discovered that in order to accomplish this, she was going to have to actually found a new conservative organization on her college campus – which she did, and with gusto!

Stacey rallied twelve other conservative students together – all hungry for formation in conservative principles – wrote a set of bylaws and got started. Soon after, Kate Obenshain came and spoke on campus, and her very presence seemed to inspire students to dare to speak out more courageously on the issues which mean the most to them.

Very frequently in the past, Stacey has felt that the atmosphere on campus prohibited students from voicing their positions. "I'm constantly challenged by liberals who think I should be silenced." As one of the few conservatives with a voice on campus, Stacey is taking the lead in encouraging others to not allow themselves to be intimidated by pressure to keep quiet. She is speaking out.

According to Stacey, it is largely the student body which attempts to stifle the expression of conservative positions on campus. "Of course this surprises me, since liberalism encourages diversity, right?" she asks. She very much appreciates the faculty members who, she says, are "surprisingly unbiased" in the classroom.

Stacey came by her conservative principles through thoughtful reflection on her own childhood experiences in what she calls an "unpaved, hidden driveway, dead-end neighborhood" where "children were abandoned by their fathers, and were left to fend for themselves." Initially, the government programs which kept her and her mother going through hard times seemed to her to be the right policy for aiding families in her situation, and she is thankful for them.

However, she couldn't help but notice that it was very clear that the system often created a kind of dependency for many families which was actually far more destructive than helpful, as over time it eroded the character, personal virtue, and work ethics of the families in her neighborhood.

Thankfully, as she says, she was "one of the few that surfaced from it all," and she has dedicated herself to advancing conservative principles which truly help those in need to learn to fend for themselves. Her motto? "Approach all things through love."

Life issues are equally close to her heart, including advancement of the pro-life cause as well as those issues which, under the guise of advancing science, erode public respect for the dignity of human life, including embryonic stem cell research. With regard to the lack of concrete advancements discovered through the work done on embryonic stem cell research, Stacey thinks that the American public has been sold a bill of goods. "With the amount of hype and money that has been poured into ESC research, this concerns and it angers me … even though … there is never a just cause for murdering innocent life."

Stacey hopes in the future to write speeches for congressmen and women. Her experiences in college have shown her that it is possible to "persuade people and show them what is real and what is not." Her life experiences give her the credibility to speak out on tough issues with both concern and conviction about what really works and what doesn't. Stacey credits her fiancée and his family with helping her to get involved, and looks forward to "working next to [her] husband, and working hard in the political world."

"It's possible to persuade people and show them what is real and what is not."