The Dartmouth Beacon

Meanwhile, the student body, though often described as politically apathetic, is clearly far to the left of the rest of the nation. A pre-election poll by The Dartmouth in 2000 found 62% of students (of 1,079 respondents) planning to vote for Al Gore, versus 23% for Bush.

A February 2003 survey showed students even more lopsided on the question of Iraq (68% against war; 22% in favor), and an October 2003 poll found that 65% of Dartmouth students disapproved of Bush’s handling of the presidency, while the president’s national approval rating was 56%4. Before winning the party’s chair, Howard Dean, came to Dartmouth last November to share his concerns that the Democratic Party was too conservative. He alternately encouraged all present to join in the political process and to reject, presumably with blood-red fury like his, Republicanism. Ravings aside, Dean did get at least one thing right. He began the speech by congratulating the Dartmouth student body for remaining, just as he remembered them from his earlier visiting professorship, “smart, thoughtful, and liberal.” Howard Dean considers the current Democrat platform to be too rightist, but he is proud to color Dartmouth’s four thousand students liberal.

In one sense, Dartmouth’s conservative reputation is merited. Many other academic institutions sit on the gauchest of peripheries. The litany of left wing ideologues from which the College on the Hill has been spared is appreciable. Princeton employs, as its Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Peter Singer, whose groundbreaking moral and philosophical views include the beliefs that, “Species is, in itself, as irrelevant to moral status as race or sex”, that infanticide of severely disabled infants whose lives would cause suffering to both themselves and their parents is morally acceptable, and that sexual relationships between humans and barnyard animals might be “mutually satisfying”.

Columbia’s Middle East Asian Languages and Cultures department came under fire last year for crossing the line between the perennial anti-Israel bias and bigoted anti-Semitism. The UC Berkeley Fall 2001 course catalogue included an undergraduate class on “The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance” whose course description warned that “conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections”. And in my hometown of Boulder, University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill gained notoriety for calling World Trade Center workers who died on September 11th “Little Eichmanns” referring to the Nazi, and, subsequently, for apparent fabrication of his American Indian heritage (which helped him land his professorship without a Ph. D.) and for plagiarism of both academic and artistic work.

So while ‘conservative’ is an absurdly inaccurate descriptor of Dartmouth’s political climate, ‘comparatively conservative’ seems to describe us rather well. Right-of-center undergraduates may fail sometimes to appreciate just how fortunate they are to attend a college with two conservative student publications, a lively campus political debate, and many excellent professors who put scholarship before indoctrination.

Fortune, though. in the strict sense of the term has very little to do with it. Dartmouth owes its relatively unbiased climate not to chance but to the hard work of generations of committed students and alumni, including nationally-known political commentators Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham. And one of Dartmouth’s newest trustees, Peter Robinson, was Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter.

Dartmouth is not atypical in this regard: on campuses across the country the fight to maintain ideological diversity has been and continues to be prosecuted almost exclusively by the right. While the fact that American college campuses are overwhelmingly liberal is hardly disputed anymore, few people aside from conservatives seem to see this as a problem. David Horowitz, for one, has caused a great deal of controversy with his push for passage of an “Academic Bill of Rights” to foster intellectual diversity and a “plurality of methodologies and perspectives” on public college campuses. (A solution properly derided by conservatives as a hypocritical affirmative action plan that flies in the face of basic principles.)8 Daniel Pipes, conservative Middle Eastern scholar, has likewise brought controversy and publicity to the issue with the 2002 establishment of Campus Watch, an organization that monitors Middle Eastern studies programs for perceived “analytical failures” as well as the conflation of politics and scholarship and “intolerance of alternative views”.

Consider an example establishment response to these efforts. Professor Robert Brandon, chair of the Duke Philosophy Department, in an attempt to dismiss allegations of anti-conservative bias and explain the scarcity of conservatives in academia, offers the enlightened observation that conservatives are stupid: “If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire,” he explained, continuing, “Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia”. While few would go this far, at least on record, most seem to view college sans conservatism as an acceptable status quo. Or if they do find the situation inequitable, they’re complaining very quietly.

This apparent lack of concern from the left is striking. One would hope that everyone, regardless of political persuasion, would be upset by the decimation of a $40,000 college education to what libertarian Daniel Klein calls a “much impoverished intellectual experience.” And even those on the left who care more about indoctrination than education ought to have second thoughts about their monopoly. Slanted campuses, in the long run, hurt liberal students and liberalism at large far more than they do conservatives.
Stefan Beck, Dartmouth graduate and assistant editor of the New Criterion articulated this argument brilliantly in an August 22 column for National Review Online. Beck likens the liberal college atmosphere to “a stroll through the gas tent,” a painful but necessary part of Basic Training for conservative students. Furthermore, he concludes, “The conservative student gets his education elsewhere while his liberal peer is left with half of one.” Beck’s article urges conservatives to stop complaining about a situation that, while far from pleasant in the short run, ultimately serves them well. By forcing conservatives to question the liberal worldview dished out daily by professors and peers, to see its flaws and to argue convincingly for their own interpretation, a biased academia ultimately sharpens their minds and gives them excellent preparation to dominate amidst the more moderate views they’re likely to encounter in the real world.

Personal experience leads me to agree wholeheartedly. As one of very few conservative students at my public high school in the beautiful liberal paradise of Boulder, Colorado, I was consistently the only one to dispute my teachers’ and colleagues’ far-left version of the facts. Not only did this experience force me to speak up in class when I would otherwise have been too shy, it accustomed me to such a stifling political environment that Dartmouth seems ideal by comparison. Boulder made me so accustomed to disagreement that I now have the tendency to play devil’s advocate all the time, no matter what the issue or my real opinion on it.

Liberal students, in contrast, largely emerge from the college cocoon unaccustomed to disagreement, and unfamiliar with any ideas other than their own. Beck recalls that during his time at Dartmouth he observed “an array of weak responses” to conservative arguments from his left wing peers, but rarely “calm, persuasive, and informed reaction to conservative ideas.” But you’ll certainly encounter some calm and informed opponents here, perhaps because of the success of our conservative minority at making its voice heard. But the effect Beck observes is predictable. In an environment where only one side of the argument is heard, it’s easy to feel well-informed and open-minded without really being so. And the ability to argue well is a result not just of innate aptitude but of practice. Conservatives whose views are constantly under attack are given far greater opportunity to hone their skills than liberals who usually find themselves in agreement with their professors and friends. It seems to me that campuses which cultivate a new generation of liberal leaders unfamiliar with the politics of half the country and unable to argue respectfully with them are detrimental to the best interests of Democrats and other liberal groups.

Critics will claim that the left still profits from liberal campuses; that the disadvantage of inexperience in confronting the other side’s views is outweighed by the fact that liberalism will gain nearly universal acceptance among students who enter college with little interest in politics. This argument has merit. Students reminded often enough that Republicans are intellectually-weak racists are unlikely to go out and vote for them. However, we must keep faith in our peers’ ability to recognize indoctrination when they see it. Even the briefest encounter with an intelligent, committed conservative will force an open-minded individual to question the reliability of the source delivering the left-wing message. Particularly outrageous instances of bias on the part of professors are more likely to cause students to turn away in disgust than convince them. And even if students remain liberal throughout college, there is a good chance they will change their minds when they leave college for the outside world and encounter a conservative majority. (Or, at the very least, when they start paying income tax.) This will be the case especially if, as previously noted, conservatives emerge from school skilled at confronting the other side, while liberals have little experience dealing with opposing views

This last prediction rests, however, on the assumption that students will evaluate arguments on their merits, rather than demonizing political opponents as sexist, racist, homophobic, etc., as a matter of course, without listening to anything they have to say. Such incivility toward opponents is, regrettably, on the rise on the left today (Recall Chairman Dean’s famous line, “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.”), and represents perhaps the most dangerous possible result of monolithically liberal campuses. I am reminded of students’ reactions to last year’s visit lecture by Daniel Pipes, controversial Middle East scholar. Despite having stated explicitly that “It’s a mistake to blame Islam, a religion fourteen centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam” and that “militant Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution,” Pipes was portrayed by some on campus as an Islamophobe- so biased he couldn’t be trusted to speak on the subject. Then many students made the bizarre leap that Pipes was a racist, perhaps reflecting a quote that compared Pipes’ visit to “bringing someone who is a racist against blacks yet who has a Ph. D. in African-American studies to come talk.” One student reacted to my attempt to set the facts straight by implying that I had no authority to defend anyone from charges of racism because I was a Republican, with the unsaid clincher, ‘and therefore a racist myself.’

This is not the sort of liberalism Democrats should wish to cultivate. Liberals who resort to ad hominem attacks to avoid having to listen to opposing points of view are not likely to change their beliefs, but neither are they likely to become nuanced thinkers able to evaluate both sides of an argument to arrive at an balanced understanding. I am optimistic enough to believe that political success is ultimately tied not just to a party’s skill at catering to its base but also to its ability to find the best answers to complicated questions. Surely liberals, who pride themselves on open-mindedness, don’t want their ranks swelled by partisans too prejudiced to listen to the other side, and thus, to find these answers.

Hence, liberals who ignore the lack of the one type of diversity they seem to view as undesirable do so at the peril of their movement’s future. As for the conservatives raising such a ruckus over under-representation, are they misguided as well? It would seem that if liberal campuses ultimately benefit us in the long run, articles such as this one that draw attention to the issue are counter-productive. If liberal campuses are good for Republicans, shouldn’t we suffer the bias gladly? The answer: not at all, because, paradoxically, conservatives reap the benefits of a liberal campus only through the struggle to change it.

A conservative who smugly and silently pities his liberal peers for their lack of experience defending their beliefs ends up no better than they. So while Beck may be right to urge conservatives on the national scene to stop their whining, those of us still in the trenches have a duty to fight on, for our own benefit as well as for the enlightenment of our liberal friends and the health of campus discourse writ large. So take heart, young conservatives, and join in the battle with the knowledge that, tough as the experience may be, you’ll come out better for it in the end. And remind any liberals who give you a hard time that you’re doing it for their own good!