Posted on 01/10/2005 5:00:09 PM PST by rface
[ snip ]<>...never has the Right flourished among college kids as it does today.
<>The number of College Republicans, for instance, has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats’ 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). And College Republicans are thriving even on elite campuses. “We’ve doubled in size over the last few years, to more than 400 students,” reports Evan Baehr, the square-jawed future pol heading the Princeton chapter. The number of College Republicans at Penn has also rocketed upward, says chapter president Stephanie Steward, from 25 or so members a couple of years ago to 700 members today. Same story at Harvard. These young Republican activists, trudging into battleground states this fall in get-out-the vote efforts, helped George W. Bush win.
Other conservative organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard’s has more than 100 students blasting away) to impudent newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools everywhere—even at Berkeley, crucible of the sixties’ student Left. And right-of-center speakers invited by these clubs are drawing large and approving crowds. “At many schools, those speeches have become the biggest events of the semester,” Time reports. One such talk at Duke by conservative author and former Comedy Central host Ben Stein, notes Time, attracted “a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier.”
[ snip ].....<>In lobbying for the bill of rights, SAF publicizes horror stories that its chapters gather: a Spanish instructor telling his class, “I wish George Bush were dead”; a public policy prof telling a student headed for a conservative conference in Washington, “Well, then, you’ll probably fail my course”; a law professor proclaiming, “We all know that the ‘r’ in Republican stands for racist”; and a criminology teacher who asked students on a test to explain why George Bush is a war criminal, and then gave an F to a student who answered that Saddam Hussein, not W, was the monster. Horowitz says that conservative kids have usually just accepted such classroom demagoguery. “They’re conservative, and their disposition is to suffer: ‘That’s just the way colleges are,’” Horowitz says. “What I’ve done as an ex-radical is to encourage them to see the injustices done to them as injustices—and do something about it.”
[ snip ]<>.....but where can a student go for teaching that doesn’t ignore or denounce conservative ideas or traditional learning but instead explores them sympathetically? Some students look to the new conservative media—talk radio, Fox News, the blogosphere. “Excluding one great economics professor, I learned more from listening to Rush Limbaugh every day than from all the NYU professors I’ve had,” says Katherine Ernst, not really joking. Several students told me that they read National Review Online and FrontPage daily as reality checks on their classes.
[[ The above is an excert of the entire, quite long article - please click the link and read the entire article. It bodes well for the new Conservative Movement that is establishing itself for America's future.....]]
I love City Journal. Glad other people are finding and reading. Keep spreadin the news....
That pretty well sums up ALL their threads.....
Some professors, however, need to be put in national headlines before they back off...
There is, maybe, a conservative shift in the student body. But the faculty is lagging these trends, and conservative professors are exceedingly rare on most campuses. Most departments are entirely controlled by leftists who will never knowingly hire a conservative or a professing Christian.
I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future, which probably means that many departments will simply atrophy or go out of business as students avoid them. Or, possibly, administrators will put their fingers in the wind, see the handwriting on the wall, and put these departments into receivership--i.e., bring in outsiders to do the hiring.
.......the battles wage on, and liberalism is on a loosing streak
School Bias PING!
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great news to hear about the rising numbers of College Republicans. Now if only some of them would enter academia themselves, then we'd see some real progress towards ideological diversity in academia. Right now the picture doesn't look too good from my perspective. I'm in a PhD program in philosophy at Rutgers, and of the 40 or so grad students in the program, there are a whopping 3 conservatives, including me. The rest are very liberal, and young too. I don't see how the situation is going to get any better as long as so many professors are liberal. When there are so few conservatives, there's really nothing to stop liberals from doing the most outrageous things like failing a kid for going to a conservative conference. So if you are a college student or know one, please consider a career in academia - we need you! Despite the liberals it's also alot of fun and the hours are great. The money isn't too bad either once you get out of grad school.
I teach (full time, just got tenure) on a college campus.
Started a Students for Academic Freedom (David Horowitz) club too.
Cool huh?
:O)
I'll think about it.
I agree, but one intelligent conservative with a backbone and who doesn't fear reprisal through grades, can go a long way toward checking the Leftism spewed from bigoted professors. I was one such student and my grades were excellent for the most part.
I even delivered a speech to an education class touting the potential merits of corporeal punishment in the classroom of public schools!!! Yes, I did it to be controversial, and yes I got a good grade on it. Like most bullies, when you stand up to them, they'll back down. Not all, of course, but we may as well step them down a bit. It's the only way Conservatism can be spread through academe.
congratulations!
congrats on tenure! It is very encouraging for undergrads to see successful conservative professors. The fact that my undergrad philo dept had several prominent conservatives in it really made my decision to go into academia alot easier. Good luck with the academic freedom club!
that's great - in many areas of the country, there's a great need for conservatives in the high school/jr high sector. Liberal high school teachers can do alot of damage - my socialist little sister is living proof of it. Also there's quite a need for science and math teachers all around.
Way cool.
Great to see I won't be alone in a few years when I begin college. If those professors want to mess with me, they don't know what they are getting into!
economics
These professors are aging former radical students who didn't have the guts to leave the campus. Since the purpose of a university is to encourage free speech and free thought, the fact that students are willing to stand up to these supposedly free-thinking professors can only be a good sign.
make sure you grab that bull by both horns - he's liable to gore you if you aren't careful
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