A Campus Welcomes Conservatism

While researching what would become their 2009 book, “Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives,” sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood conducted extensive student interviews at two schools: Harvard and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Although the faculty members they encountered were overwhelmingly liberal, Ms. Binder and Ms. Wood found that students at Boulder “were far likelier [than Harvard students] to contend that their professors bring those personal politics into the classroom.”

The authors’ visit to Boulder coincided with the arrival of Bruce Benson as president of the University of Colorado system. If they returned now, on the eve of Mr. Benson’s retirement this month after 11 years at the helm, they would find a decidedly different campus climate. The reason is Mr. Benson’s determination to bring vibrant and serious ideological diversity to the “Berkeley of the Rockies.”

Mr. Benson became president amid a sea of troubles after the 2007 financial collapse. The ensuing recession led the state to cut funding for the university system by about 35%. A successful businessman and one time head of the Colorado GOP, Mr. Benson didn’t limit himself to the traditional fundraising role of university presidents. He also made achieving viewpoint diversity a priority.

The result was the establishment of a new faculty slot that I was privileged to be the first to hold: the Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy. I spent the 2013-14 academic year as a visiting scholar in the political science and environmental studies departments. A parade of well-known and highly regarded conservative academics have since rotated through Boulder: What started as a three-year pilot will enter its seventh year this fall, welcoming its eighth visiting scholar, Villanova’s Colleen Sheehan.

A parade of well-known and highly regarded conservative academics have since rotated through Boulder: Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College, Brian Dimitrovic of Sam Houston State College, Francis Beckwith of Baylor, Robert Kaufman of Pepperdine University, William B. Allen of Michigan State and Stephen Presser of Northwestern. What started as a three-year pilot will enter its seventh year this fall, welcoming its eighth visiting scholar, Villanova’s Colleen Sheehan.

Hiring by ideological criteria is an imperfect answer to universities’ leftist skew. Some conservatives worried this approach resembled “affirmative action” for conservatives, but it might be better to think of it as the intellectual equivalent of antitrust, breaking up the increasingly anticompetitive marketplace of ideas in universities. The University of California’s legendary president Clark Kerr observed decades ago that “few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others.” Change doesn’t come easily.

Although most conservative academics don’t conduct themselves as deliberate ideological advocates in the classroom, there is a benefit for universities to have some “conspicuous conservatism” in Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s phrase. Conservative students know their views won’t be mocked in the classroom, and curious liberal students—I heard this from several—want the challenge of a different perspective. It enables the university to live up to what Mr. Benson cites as its mission: teaching students how to think, not what to think. It helps reclaim academia’s place as a true marketplace of ideas and sends the message on campus and beyond that differing intellectual viewpoints matter. Perhaps most important, the effort is changing the culture on campus.

To avoid the program becoming an isolated outpost of ideological sectarianism, Mr. Benson revived and expanded a dormant Center for the Study of Western Civilization to house visiting conservative scholars and develop an expanded program of speakers, public events, seminars, and student and faculty fellowships. Earlier this month the university renamed the center for Mr. Benson.

A century ago the Cambridge classicist F.M. Cornford wrote that the first rule of faculty governance is “nothing should ever be done for the first time,” and Mr. Benson’s model is spreading in variations at other universities. A few similar programs already existed, such as the James Madison Program at Princeton and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2016 I have been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley—an unimaginable prospect if not for my time at Boulder.

Bruce Benson can point to a stellar record—tripling fundraising, finding hundreds of millions in administrative efficiencies, research funding that surpassed $1 billion—that any college president would envy. But he is proudest of his success in bringing real viewpoint diversity to campus. His model deserves to be emulated.

Mr. Hayward is a senior fellow at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a fellow of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

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