Remember the 1960s, when radical students confronted conservative college administrators and faculty with sit-ins and protest marches? Fast-forward to the 21st century. You’ll find much of the same spirit on campuses around the nation. But this time, conservative students are defying and protesting the leftist values and policies of the faculty and administrators. What’s going on here?
To gain an understanding, let’s start with the fundamentals. There has been a slow, steady shift in campus politics going on virtually under the radar, since perhaps as early as the 1970s. It is the shift among students from the liberal left to the conservative right. And, recently it has begun to come into its own and show its might.
A few quick statistics about the changing attitudes on campus provide a good sense of what’s happening:
As recently as 1995, surveys found that 66 percent of freshmen wanted the wealthy to pay higher taxes. Today, only 50 percent do.
Today, just 17 percent of students value taking part in environmental programs, half the number in 1992, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.
In the early 1990s, two-thirds of students supported the right of women to have an abortion. The figure today is just over half.
Some 88 percent of male high school seniors, and 93 percent of females, thought it was extremely important to have a “good marriage and family life,” according to a survey done in 2001.
College students have moved to the right along with the overall population, with 31 percent identifying themselves as Republicans, 27 percent as Democrats, and the rest unaffiliated, according to a 2003 study by the Harvard Institute of Politics.
In a mock election run by Channel One, which broadcasts in public schools, 1.4 million high school students reelected George W. Bush in a landslide, with 55 percent of the popular vote and 393 electoral votes ? a greater victory than the 51 percent of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes that he actually won.
Just six years ago, there were only 400 College Republican organizations nationwide. Today, there are 1,148, with a membership of more than 120,000.
In short, college campuses are no longer hotbeds of liberalism.
At the same time, faculties appear to have been taken over by politically correct, leftist ideologues who, for the most part, deplore dissent. All too frequently, professors behave as political advocates in the classroom, express opinions in a partisan manner on controversial issues irrelevant to the academic subject, and even grade students in a manner designed to enforce their conformity to the professor’s views.
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Here are some recent cases of abuses, as reported on the Web sites studentsforacademicfreedom.org and nonindoctrination.org.
Steven Hinkle was a student at Cal Poly University when he posted a flier for a speech by Mason Weaver, a black conservative author who believes that African-Americans are too dependent on government programs. Other students tried to stop Hinkle from putting up the notice. He did so anyway, and the students filed a complaint with the campus police. The Cal Poly Judicial Office found Hinkle guilty of “disrupting a campus event,” and forced him to write letters of apology to the students. The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education is suing the University in federal court for violating Hinkle’s First Amendment rights.
Students at the University of Washington held “affirmative action bake sales” to protest categorizing students based on skin color. The administration shut down the sales, while leftist students tore down signs and physically threatened the students who were holding the sale. No action was taken against the students who caused the disruption. Similar events have occurred at both Southern Methodist University and UC-Irvine.
Journalism students at Whittier College in California started a conservative newspaper called the Liberty Bell. They were told that they needed permission from the school’s publications board to publish it, despite the fact that none of the other four publications on campus had been forced to seek permission. In fact, the students found out that the publications board couldn’t even hold a meeting, because it didn’t have a chairman and was missing several members.
In one shocking incident at Citrus College in California, students were given an assignment to write letters to President Bush protesting the war in Iraq. Those who refused were denied credit for the assignment in what was a required course.
Equally incredible was the criminology professor at a Colorado university who assigned students to write an essay on why President Bush was a war criminal. A student who instead wrote why Saddam Hussein was the war criminal was given a failing grade.
This disparity of views is even more poignant when you look at the difference between the opinions of college professors and what most ordinary people think. In a recent survey, the Luntz Research Center for the Study of Popular Culture asked 1,000 Ivy League professors and 5,000 ordinary Americans their opinions on a number of issues.
The results show tremendous bias in how universities select teachers. For example, while only 3 percent of professors claimed to be Republicans, 37 percent of citizens affiliated themselves with that party. While almost 80 percent of professors thought the President was too conservative, only 38 percent of overall population felt that way.
Professors and the general public were so sharply divided on some issues as to be diametrically opposed. For example, nearly three-fourths of professors were against a missile defense system, while nearly the same number of ordinary Americans were for it. Likewise, while only 13 percent of teachers favored tax cuts, fully 67 percent of the population favored it.
In other words, college professors, and especially those at Ivy League schools, are sadly out of tune with the opinions and politics of the American people.
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Throughout the nation, students on college campuses are protesting these abuses. Unhappy with the monolithically liberal stance of virtually all outside speakers, students are bringing in conservative intellectuals who are greeted by huge, enthusiastic crowds.
That reaction is predictable: As in prior generations, college students don’t like to be told what to think. More importantly, we’re witnessing the natural outcome of a generation of American students who grew up in an era that saw both the end of the Soviet Union and the most productive period in U.S. economic history coinciding with an emphasis on free markets.
Add to this the perceived oppression caused by liberal ideology on college campuses in the form of mandates for political correctness, suppression of true free speech, obligatory ethnic diversity, and the clear lack of political diversity among the leftist-dominated faculty ? and you have a recipe for a revolution of a whole new kind.
In 2003, the Independent Women’s Forum surveyed college students and learned that up to one-third of them felt that in order to get good grades, they had to conceal their own political and ideological thinking from their liberal professors. And a survey at the top 50 colleges just released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni shows that half of all students, whatever their politics, report that professors not only inject their political views into course materials, but insist that students go along with their thinking ? or risk getting lower grades.
Several recent incidents at major universities have served to highlight the situation. Columbia University became embroiled in controversy because several pro-Arab professors were promoting anti-Israel agendas in the classroom and penalizing students who dared to voice an opposing opinion. Even Columbia’s own liberal newspaper called “foul,” saying that a diversity of ideas was required in any academic setting.
The most prominent incident was the backlash over the remarks made by Dr. Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, in his address to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Summers suggested that there might be differences between men and women that accounted for more men succeeding in the higher reaches of science. His ideas were fairly tame, and in fact were well supported by research.
Summers cited three reasons for the disparity between the number of men and women in scientific professions. The first was that success in a modern career requires working 80-hour weeks, something most women weren’t willing to do because of family considerations. He next suggested that natural gender differences led to different aptitudes for men and women in the sciences. And he concluded that socialization and discrimination might also contribute to the under-representation of women in the sciences.
The howling of protest from the left, both inside and outside the ivy halls of Harvard, could be heard literally around the world, as the press picked it up and turned it into a firestorm.
On March 15, the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard censured Summers with an almost unprecedented vote of “no confidence.” Summers apologized profusely, set up task forces to recruit more women, and vowed to change his ways. Fortunately, the governing Harvard Corporation, the only body that can fire Summers, supported him.
It is this very claustrophobic intellectual atmosphere that has given rise to the numerous national organizations that are attempting to bring diversity of thought to the academic environment. They are using student clubs to sponsor conservative speakers and thereby give students back their right to express their true views publicly without fear. Among the most successful of these organizations is Students for Academic Freedom, which was founded in 2003 and already has charters on 130 campuses.
SAF is establishing an “Academic Bill of Rights” for students, which would prevent colleges from blacklisting professors on the basis of their conservative politics and ensure that classes don’t become political forums for liberal agendas. There are already 19 states considering legislation that would enshrine those ideas into law. Colorado has adopted a version of the bill voluntarily.
Given these developments, we submit the following three forecasts for your consideration:
First, in the short term, the pendulum will continue to swing to the right. The left-wing stranglehold on academic institutions is coming unglued, and the forces of change are working upward from the student body ? in many cases all the way to the state legislatures. Even so, it will be a good while before colleges shed their left-wing atmosphere.
Second, organizations like SAF will continue to grow and exert stronger influence, not only on the student body but also on college faculties and administrations whose positions will become increasingly untenable. These campaigns to bring intellectual diversity to academic institutions will result in legislation that brings more political equality to American colleges. The students clearly have a new kind of power. When Harvard faculty censured Summers for his remarks, more than 600 students signed a statement saying it was wrong to do so.
Third, as the “old guard” at these universities retires or dies off, newer professors will come to occupy those chairs, and they will be drawn from the very student bodies that are now protesting the oppressive intellectual climate they’ve had to endure. Within the next decade, we will start to see a major change toward openness to alternative views in academia.
References List : 1. The Financial Times, March 18, 2005, “Bright Idea, Dumb Reaction.” ⓒ Copyright 2005 by The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved.2. City Journal, Winter 2005, “On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back,” by Brian C. Anderson. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by The Manhattan Institute. All rights reserved.
