Student at small Ohio college faces resistance starting Turning Point chapter

A determined student at Baldwin Wallace University in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, says she is facing resistance from classmates as she starts a Turning Point USA chapter on campus.

“We never really got the momentum that we needed and the support that we needed, but this year after, you know, Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s such an unfortunate circumstance that it gave us the push that we needed to get this up and going on campus,” Grace Pruchnicki, a senior, told Fox News Digital.

Pruchnicki said she will serve as president of the new chapter, which is not yet officially recognized by the university. She said she’s working with student services to complete the approval process.

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Pruchnicki said she wanted to start a Turning Point USA chapter last year, but the push has gained momentum after Kirk’s assassination.

“It brought out a lot of people that had been scared to speak out, and we ultimately all got together and were able to get this up and running, and we are currently in the process of getting approved,” Pruchnicki said.

While Pruchnicki said the group is close to being recognized, she added that it has come with hostility from fellow students.

“We have people that tear down our posters every single day, we have people that have filled out a general interest form so that we can have a list of people to contact when we start having meetings, and we’ve had a lot of hate speech in those forms that people have filled out,” she said.

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Despite the backlash, she said Baldwin Wallace faculty have been more supportive.

“We have a really supportive advisor who has been helping us out a lot,” she said. “I have personally had many faculty members from all different departments on campus reach out to me personally and say, you know, they support everything that we’re doing and if we need any help too that they will absolutely 100% help us.”

Fox News Digital reached out to Baldwin Wallace University for comment. 

One student on campus, Carly Voltz, who is listed as the president of Baldwin Wallace’s Students for Justice in Palestine group, started a petition to stop the TPUSA chapter.

Voltz told Fox News Digital that the petition is her personal initiative and not affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine.

“I started the petition to gauge how many students at BW would be opposed to a Turning Point chapter being established on our campus,” Voltz said. “I saw that many students were raising concerns, and I wanted to have a number behind those concerns so that people could see that this wasn’t just a few students. The petition currently has 198 responses, though not all those responses are from BW students, and the petition was only circulated through social media.”

“All I know is that there were about 100 signatures on it,” Pruchnicki told Fox News Digital. “As of about a month ago, I’m not sure where it’s at now. I don’t have access to any of that information because it’s all been blocked from me.”

Pruchnicki said she would tell students who are in a similar place and worried about possible repercussions or pushback of starting a chapter to embrace the challenge.

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“If it’s something you truly believe in, it’s 100% worth it,” Pruchnicki said. “I was very afraid of doing this and taking this on, especially… taking on the president role.”

“But standing up for what you believe in is so important,” Pruchnicki added. “I think we need to have that open dialogue that Turning Point represents to be able to find some common ground. And, you know, you may. You may lose friends, you may have pushback, but you have to keep your head up and just know that, you know, because you’re receiving that pushback just means that’s why you need it even more.”

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Requests for new Turning Point USA chapters have surged since Kirk’s assassination, the 31-year-old co-founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed Sept. 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University.

According to the organization, more than 120,000 students have inquired about launching new high school and college chapters in the weeks since Kirk’s assassination.