"Right Side Up" rise of conservatism on nation's campuses

[fencesitter]

Right side up
With their ranks swelling on college campuses, young conservatives say they are revolutionaries fighting a liberal establishment. They're meeting in D.C. this week to promote the cause

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/6361513.htm

They've come to hear words of wisdom from Ferris Bueller scene stealer Ben Stein, funkadelic music promoter Reginald Jones, bomb-throwing bombshell Ann Coulter, and the impossible-to-squelch G. Gordon Liddy, among others.

They're here to tour Capitol Hill, hear a lecture on "the failures of feminism," and hang out with others of their kind.

...What is happening to our children? where have we gone wrong? Every parent's lament. My parents didn't understand my liberalism and I didn't grow out of it.

[larryepke]

1. This is a trend?

187 people?

However, I suspect colleges will get more conservative in the next few years. With less student aid, rising tuitions as revenue-strapped states are able to foot less of the bill and a falling of the general economy, the students will be proportionally more from the wealthy (and proportionally less representative of racial minorites in the general public).

[BoatsTwice]

2. With the following perception out there going strong. . .

"Conservatives want to run their own lives," Robinson said. "Liberals want to run other people's lives and spend other people's money."

. . .we might be in the minority for awhile.

[RandomKoolzip]

3. Conservatives want to run the lives of anyone earning less than

eighty grand a year by forcing them to work, at slave's wages, two full-time jobs with no benefits. That's most of the country, nowadays.

[dae]

5. What they say and what they mean are not the same!

Robinson said, "Liberals want to run other people's lives and spend other people's money."

What he meant was, "Conservatives want to ruin other people's lives and steal other people's money."

[Warpy]

4. This is nothing new, folks

Since the 1960s, conservative stink tanks have been funding groups on college campuses. Then it was the Ripon Society and YAF. Now there are a dozen or more well-funded conservative groups out there recruiting students using the same tactics of love-bombing that the Moonies used.

Since there is obviously no real liberal establishment left, thanks in part to these efforts, one wonders what their rebellious zeal will focus on as their next project. After all, it's no fun agitating in favor of the prevailing establishment, is it?

I tend to think these groups are on the decline, not on the rise. College students can longer look forward to anything besides scraping by in a job they could have gotten right out of high school, unless their families are well connected enough to get them a job that demands a degree.

I was reading a bio of Julia Child, celebrating her 90th birthday. When asked how someone from an old Yankee GOP family could become a Democrat, she said "I was a Republican until I went to New York and had to live on $18.00 a week. Then I became a Democrat."

[diplomats]

6. I didn't know Julia Child was a Democrat

Cool.

[LoneStarLiberal]

7. Understandable though sad

I think part of it boils down to one of the fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals: Conservatives tend to be more monolithic and tend to have more of a hive-mind about things than liberals, who by our very nature are fractured.

One other comment was also dead-on as well, though: Conservative think tanks throw money at campus conservative organizations like there is no tomorrow. As far as I know there are no such efforts made on the liberal side of things.

In times when things are economically tight as they are now, conservatism appeals to people of all stripes, particularly those who are looking at venturing into a very hostile job market. Think about it: Conservatism is all about blaming someone for your problems. Liberals provide conservatives endless excuses for their own failures and for the failure of their ideology.

That whole idea of taking up the ladder after yourself looks real good to a lot of college conservatives.

[expatriot]

8. "Conservative" and higher education are contradictions.

conservatives are out destroy higher education... they want to change universities into job training and indoctrination centers.

when conservatives attack the level of ignorance in our society they are biting the hand that feeds them.

[rosey_vomisa]

10. Indoctrination Centers?

I would have to disagree with this sentiment. In my poli-sci and gender studies classes I was very dismayed that the professors would demean and harrass the conservative students. I don't agree with these students, but I think they have a right to state their thoughts without being treated badly. So often, we were graded on how well we agreed with our professors, and not on how well we argued a point. I am a liberal, but I don't think people should be punished for being conservative. This was especially just before and during the recent war. I didn't hear one professor who wasn't speaking out against the war, so I don't think the conservatives have an upper hand in education in this country at all.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Demean and harass the conservative students?

Or simply force them to confront the logical fallacies in their thinking?

When I was teaching (1982-1993), I was in a field that didn't provide much opportunity to discuss politics, but a sizable minority of each class was truly thin-skinned.

If you criticized their academic work or behavior at all, they'd turn sullen for the rest of the semester and get back at you on the student evaluations. They'd also go around telling all their friends how awful you were, and then their friends would hate you, too.

Also, I was on the honors program committee at one college for three years, and the business professors (almost all die-hard Republicans) let their alleged honors students get by with tremendously sloppy research on their senior papers--outdated sources, no sources, giving only one side of the argument and not even recognizing that there was another side. I didn't expect the students to necessarily come up with liberal conclusions, but I didn't think it was too much to expect them to mention the liberal views on their topic, even if it was only to refute them. Both the students and the professors would get huffy when the committee sent the papers back for revision.

So, Rosey, I have to wonder if you were a friend of one of those thin-skinned conservative students (is there any other kind?) who got sucked into one of their "poor little me" campaigns.

[rosey_vomisa]

18. Insults versus argument

There is a big difference between confronting students' fallacies and screaming at them and calling them rude names in front of the class. One kid politely questioned a statement the prof made in the gender studies class. We were all interested to hear her response. But, much to my disappointment, she screamed at the kid, literally telling him, 'How DARE you question me?' and calling him a couple of unwarranted names. Not all incidents were this extreme, but I've seen other profs literally call kids 'stupid' in front of the whole class for having a different opinion. (To answer your accusation, I did not know the kid who got screamed at, nor do I personally know any of the 'stupid' students.) How is any of this a rational confrontation of fallacies? Why not show the students how wrong they are with evidence instead of using aggression and humiliation?

I agree that a lot of kids these days can't take criticism in class. I am a third-year doctoral student and TA -- believe me, I can tell the difference between kids who are irritated about grades or about being proved wrong in class and kids who genuinely feel marginalized by an aggressive and mean-spirited professor. I ascribe a lot of the 'sensitivity' of students to too much undeserved praising in grammar and high school. In Finland, where I come from, kids are not coddled and told they are so special all the time. They learn to handle criticism very early on. But a professor, who is the embodiment of professionalism, should be able to handle this kind of sensitivity with aplomb.

Ms. Leftcoast, I think you sound like a lot of the people you condemn when you label all conservative students as thin-skinned. As a liberal from Scandinavia, I came here thinking that American liberals fought against such gross generalizations -- even toward their adversaries. And, I feel insulted that you have accused me, a person you don't even know, of being "sucked in" by a person instead of seeing value in a fellow human regardless of political stripe. I find I can often persuade someone to see the liberal side of an issue by living the example of tolerance instead of berating them. My compassion for a person does not stop when I find that he/she does not think exactly like me.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. There may be non-thin-skinned conservatives

but I never met any at the small colleges where I taught. The campuses were largely apolitical, save for a few tiny groups of left activists, almost entirely environmentalists in those days. But the conservatives always acted like a put-upon minority group anyway, even though they had the support of the business department.

(There was a liberal in the business department for a couple of years, but she complained about being frozen out, because her course in personnel management emphasized treating employees like human beings, so she left in disgust after a short time. She was replaced by a woman who looked as if she bit people's heads off for a hobby.)

I agree that professors shouldn't belittle students, and any professor who does so has problems with no political solution. However, that vice is not limited to left-wing professors by any means. In graduate school in the 1970s, before the laws on sexual harassment and discrimination were in place, I had to deal with a couple of old-school Ivy League professors who openly disparaged the women students in class in front of everyone and set up roadblocks in their progress toward a degree, simply because they didn't like their Old Boys' Club being disturbed.

The idea that only left-wing professors insult conservative students and not the other way around is a myth. You may have never experienced conservatives ganging up on liberals, but it does happen, and many of our high school and college-age DUers could tell you stories.

[MissMarple]

9. These idiots have always been around.

They are not conservative. They are handicapped with a very narrow and sometimes very stupid view. In 1967, when I was a freshman in college, a Campus Crusader for "Christ", said if I hadn't studied for a test and asked GOD for help, I could pass the test. Gee, isn't life simple and easy. They think they have found the "somewhere over the rainbow" place.

These guys will never go away. But, then, never will we.

And so we dance.

[Rich Hunt]

11. this is nothing new

In my day, it was "Accuracy in Academia" and the various "Review" newspapers.

Many of the students who wrote for the "____ Review" newspapers went on to book deals and pundit glory....or they got jobs with right-wing think tanks, in spite of being underqualified. It's AA for bitter rich white kids.

The important thing to remember is that these groups wouldn't exist if they weren't funded by multi-millionaires. Liberal and left-wing groups need no such support. As long as asshole millionaires are around, they will exist.

[ameriphile]

12. Big money

These kinds of conservative "movements" are astoundingly well-funded and quite professionally choreographed. And their self-described "revolutionaries" are little more than lost, overprivileged white kids who grew up insulated from the real world, and now think that they're standing up against some kind of threatening liberal establishment.

David Brock exposes the inner workings of this kind of phenomenon in his book Blinded by the Right.

[meow2u3]

13. I'm tired of conservatives whining about the "liberal establishment"

I'm also fed up with their constantly pretending to be victims of the so-called liberal establishment when in fact they're just running to Mommy when their targets finally fight back!!!!!!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. That's basically what I said above

They start whimpering when a professor insists that they defend their half-baked Limbaugh Legends with logic and facts.

[Rich Hunt]

16. more on academic freedom

There was a related article in today's Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0307250204jul25,1,6256898.story?coll=chi-printnews-hed

You have to register to read it.

Here's a taste:

Academic freedom debate comes to boil at Berkeley
A proposed UC policy change would eliminate a 1934 requirement that lectures be free of bias, but opponents say it could trample students' rights

By V. Dion Haynes
Tribune national correspondent
Published July 25, 2003

BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the 1960s, this University of California campus helped give birth to what has become a worldwide tool for social change: the free-speech movement, which forced administrators to recognize students' right to demonstrate.

Now this campus has spawned a new national debate over a proposal to broaden the academic freedom rights of faculty.

At issue is an antiquated academic freedom policy that state lawmakers 69 years ago forced the school to adopt out of fear that Communist professors were indoctrinating students in the classroom. The policy requires faculty to present impartial lectures free of their personal political biases.

[Tinoire]

17. Young Conservatives

Have you heard the word?
The revolution's over.
Now the anger's disappeared
And the rebels are much older.
And the schools and universities
Are turning out a brand new breed of young conservatives.

Get yourself a brand new scene,
Keep your collars white and clean,
It's time to come and join the young conservatives.

Revolution used to be cool,
But now it's out of fashion.
Politeness is the rule,
And not an angry young man's passion.
And they've used up all the alternatives,
And they're rushing down the street to join
The young conservatives.
Conservatives.

Ban the bomb, oh how contemporary,
In your parents' car.
Another chip off the block, is that all that you are?
Look at all the young conservatives
Hanging out in the bars.
It's got to stop before it goes to fa-fa-fa-fa-far.

Get yourself some new attire,
Set your sights a little higher,
You're going to join the young conservatives.

The establishment is winning,
Now the battle's nearly won.
The rebels are conforming,
See the father, now the sons.
All the urgency and energy
Have turned into complacency,
Now the schools and universities are turning out a
Brand new breed of young conservatives.
Conservatives.

Rebel, rebel found a cause,
Now it's hampstead not east end
And now he's such a well respected man.
The only action that you see
Is in the sunday times.
Content to sit in bed and read between the lines.

Rebel, rebel join the young conservatives.
Be a devil join the new conservatives.

It's a victory for order
Now they've beaten everyone.
The rebels are too old now,
And the young just want to be young.
All the urgency and energy
Have turned into complacency.
Now the schools and universities are turning out a
Brand new breed of young conservatives.
Conservatives.

Look at all the young conservatives.
Look at all the young conservatives.


Kinks - State Of Confusion - Young Conservatives - 1983