Posted on 12/10/2016 6:18:09 AM PST by raccoonradio
It ain’t easy being a Republican at Harvard, and certainly not in the era of Donald Trump, according to Emily Hall, an unabashed conservative at the world’s most famous university.
Hall, a junior who’s majoring in government, watched the presidential election results come in at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, once again finding herself in the minority while stunned Hillary Clinton supporters openly sobbed with each victory racked up by Trump.
“I felt bad for them,” Hall said of her liberal schoolmates. “But I also recognize that people would not have felt bad for me if I had been the one crying.
"I’ve experienced both tolerance and intolerance, depending on who I’m talking to,” Hall said during interviews with both the Herald and Boston Herald Radio yesterday.
“There are some places where discourse is welcome. There are other circles and other individuals I’ve interacted with who have not been so tolerant, who have been open and willing to call Republicans racist or sexist or xenophobic.
“I think that intensified with Trump,” she said. Hall, a 20-year-old native of Clinton, Conn., said professors and students often broached Trump’s victory as if a horrific tragedy had taken place and spoke of creating support for Clinton backers.
“Had Hillary won, I don’t know those same sentiments would have been extended, because the assumption was the majority of everyone in the room were liberals and were Democrats,” said Hall. “It was just disheartening to me.” There have been other examples of well-meaning liberal professors not presenting balance in their lectures, she said.
“They want to include conservative perspectives in the classroom, they just don’t know how,” said Hall. “And I think they may not even realize that what they’re teaching has a liberal bent to it, because there are so few conservatives there to actually challenge that.
“I think that often people will teach things in a way that I guess doesn’t showcase the other side … Maybe because they haven’t seen someone who actually articulates the other side to them, they don’t realize there is an intelligent other side,” she said.
Hall said that liberal group-think at Harvard has created an environment where some Republicans don’t bother speaking out.
“I’d say there are a lot more that are openly Republican and conservative,” she said. “I think people tend to be less politically active when they’re conservative, just because there are so many fewer people who actually identify with those beliefs on campus.”
But there have been promising signs of late, she added. Hall has started a group on campus for conservative female students, called the Network of Enlightened Women — and it’s since received official recognition as a student group by Harvard.
She knew Harvard leaned heavily leftward when she first hit the Cambridge campus — and was even jokingly warned before she left home not to lose her conservative principles in the land of liberals. Still, she admitted her first few months at the school were a “culture shock.”
“It’s been a good thing for me because I’ve learned a lot about how to defend my beliefs,” she said. “I absolutely respect people who have liberal beliefs, but I think they need to expose themselves to the other point of view as well and they need to listen to the other side and be able to argue back against the other side. “We have a government that’s almost completely controlled by Republicans right now,” she noted. “If they ever want to regain control … then they need to understand the other side and be able to argue succinctly and intelligently against the other side.”
Being from Indiana (aka flyover country), none of my kids will go to the Northeast for college.
“They want to include conservative perspectives in the classroom, they just don’t know how,” said Hall. “And I think they may not even realize that what they’re teaching has a liberal bent to it, because there are so few conservatives there to actually challenge that.”
If she really believes this she is dreadfully naive.
Way back in my first BS in Pharmacy degree training all we heard about was HMO’s and how they would save Health Care in the US. I knew these profs were Liberals and told them what they wanted to hear.
I was an adult student. It was not hard to pretend to be one of them to get the A’s from liberal professors. Easier to act dumb than smart...
Conservatives in those conditions avoid interacting with leftists because leftism is emotionally driven, while conservatism is arrived through reason. One cannot reason with someone who is driven primarily by emotion. The tears are the proof of emotion. Would Hillary to have one, I doubt many conservatives would have been reduced to tears, because they were't so demolished by either election of obama.
“She really should be questioning the true value of the education that she is receiving instead of the name of the college/university on the degree”
THe education at Harvard is secondary. The connections are primary.
Connections that are both infamous and against the people in this country who are not ‘privileged’ and ‘informed’.
They are our enemy, frankly.
“I doubt many conservatives would have been reduced to tears, “
—
No, they wouldn’t cry because conservatives are adults.
.
.
The heart is not the thinking organ.
I visited over at “FREEPER MADNESS” several weeks before
the election. I KEPT telling them over and over that
Donald J. Trump was going to be elected. They “pretended”
to ignore me, insisted that Hillary was most certainly
going to be elected. After the election, they pretended
that they weren’t all the confident; then PETULANTLY
banned me AFTER HITLER-Y LOST. (They also have floated
the “theory” that I am not TWINKIE and that I’m probably
just either an he/she/it. WELL, I’M A WOMAN in her 70’s
who shoots the old Smith & Wesson revolver that my great
great grandfather used to carry when he was a lightkeeper
on the Tinase River in the early 1900’s.) They pooh-poohed
me & boo-hooed about Hillary’s defeat. I told them she
wouldn’t SPIT on them if they were on fire and they told
me that basically TRUMP wouldn’t spit on me either. I
implied that I do not really want anyone to spit on me.
I hear you!
But we need to be careful. As soon as we start talking about what we'll "allow" we start to sound like them.
Unfortunately we have to put up with the speech in the name of freedom.
But it's a completely different issue when they start breaking the law. Then we should come down hard.
Other than they are not Conservatives. If you aksed them to define what a Liberal is or a Fascist or Communist, they would just look at you and go, "Huh?".
Sixth grade, actually.
>>Germany - Heidelberg?
Well, Martin Heidegger, the developer of the Fuehrerprinzip and a defender of Naziism until his death, was at University of Freiburg.
That’s how OXFORD got its name. It is where the OXEN used
to FORD the stream. - It’s lots of universities all rolled
into one now. Son graduated from ORIEL COLLEGE AT OXFORD
UNIVERSITY. - I’ve watched the PBS show about Inspector
Lewis just to see where our son went to university. - If
Lewis was right about it; there was a murder every week or
two at Oxford. When I asked my son how many murders they’d
had at Oxford; he said he thought maybe there had been one
in the whole last century, if that many.
I watched a Lewis episode in which a worker at the “ World Most Famous Library the Bodleian and it was the first murder there in 300 years
I went to a very liberal school back in the day. I delighted in wearing Reagan shirts and GOP paraphernalia. I should add Inwas 6’3 290 and started at LT so I enjoyed smoking the little snow flakes. The only bad time I had was when my teammate led a “No Justice, No Peace” Rally. I like to stand in the middle of those and make them go around me. He was the starting RB and was built like a bomb shelter. We squared off but mutually decided to let it go. Now we have 50 year old dad bods and laugh about it
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
I am thinking more of challenging them on what they say. My hairdresser said she scoured the internet and couldn’t find ONE thing good about Donald Trump. I let it slide because she is very good at what she does with my hair and I don’t feel like going through the test and failure stages of finding a new beautician.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.