Student Group of the Year Nominee Profile: The UNR SfL

2009 was a very productive year for the University of Nevada-Reno Students for Liberty.  Last spring they brought in the Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranias to teach the group about effective local activism with his presentation, “The Top Ten Ways to Effectively Increase Liberty at the Local Level.”  The members took those lessons to heart and have become very active in their local community.

They started a series of bi-weekly discussion forums open to the campus community.  The topics they have covered a range from the introductions to liberty, to the in depth policy discussions, to the somewhat bizarre.  A sample list of topics includes the philosophy of liberty, medicine and the free market,  anarcho-capitalism, Jack Bauer, critical thinking,  student government elections, The worst presidents, zombies and liberty, and libertarian perspectives on file sharing.  Their meetings have only gotten better with time with more people participating every week.

This fall they kicked the semester of by hosting Students Rights Week.  The culminating event was called “How to Survive a Police Encounter,” where a documentary was shown and Washoe County Public Defender Linda M. Nordvig helped explain the film and answered specific questions from the audience. The event helped attendees know what rights they have when it comes to dealing with the police, for instance the right against self-incrimination and knowing whether or not a police officer has the right to search a person’s property without a warrant. With nearly one hundred people in attendance, the event was a great success.

The UNR SfL is also famous for having one of the most popular student websites in the country with hundreds of regular viewers from all over the nation. It is updated regularly with interesting bits of news (both local and national),  about the club and original articles. This blog was even placed as a notable runner-up in the America’s Future Foundation as the best undergraduate blog of 2009.  Not content to limit their writing to the blogosphere, they also published hundreds of copies of their publication The Liberty Report. In it they discussed current events, wrote philosophical pieces on the nature of libertarianism, and introduced incoming freshman and blooming libertarians to the issues which interested the club. Currently, the UNR Students for Liberty are the only ASUN club to produce a regular publication.

The club is also very active in their  student government (the ASUN).  Members of the club were partly responsible for the Students Taking Action and Reducing Tuition (START) campaign, which many of them helped organize and lead. The START campaign was used as a vehicle to bring to the attention of students and candidates the concerns of fiscal responsibility, leadership, and commitment within student government. It espoused many libertarian ideals and has been called by some “an experiment in libertarianism at the student government level.” Over the holidays the club also created the 10 Days Before Christmas series on their blog, which highlighted the wasteful ways of their student government.

The club has been very active off campus as well.  They have made ties with many local liberty based groups, including Reno Sons and Daughters of Liberty, the Leadership Institute, the northern Nevada division of the Libertarian Party, and even the Republican Liberty Caucus. The Students for Liberty have worked with many local groups and even other ASUN clubs to put on events and host forms.  At the Fourth of July Reno Tea Party former UNR SfL President Barry Belmont gave a speech about the “Placation of Taxation,” which was well-received by a crowd of around 2000 protesters.

While they are active promoting liberty in many ways, the members also take some time out to enjoy their liberties.  The club hosted two gun shooting socials, one in the Spring of 2009 and one in the Fall, where members got to talk about the right of gun ownership and what the framers of the constitution had in mind with respect to firearms, while learning from gun experts how to properly handle and fire a variety of different guns.