Liberalism abounding in America

During her first two years at the University of Pennsylvania,
Stephanie Steward became convinced that she was being treated unfairly
because of her political views. In her class on diversity and the law,
a professor seemed obsessed with the evils of slavery. Another
professor's defense of the estate tax struck her as excessively
one-sided. The Daily Pennsylvanian, where she worked, seemed to
exhibit subtle political bias. Eventually Steward decided that she had
taken enough abuse. So last year the junior launched a newspaper of
her own, The Pennsylvania Independent, and this year she will take the
publication biweekly. Starting a newspaper costs money (her budget for
this school year will run about $15,000). Fortunately for Steward, a
portion of that money will come from the Intercollegiate Studies
Institute (ISI), a conservative organization that funds college
publications.

Steward's story will sound familiar to anyone who has talked to
college conservatives. "It takes a little oppression to really get
engaged and involved," says Evan Baehr, a junior at Princeton
University, where he is editor in chief of the conservative Princeton
Tory and president of the College Republicans. Like Steward, Baehr
sees himself as an oppressed minority on his campus -- and he, too,
has turned to national conservative organizations for remedy. The Tory
received tens of thousands of dollars last year from groups such as
the Leadership Institute, the Young America Foundation and the ISI to
fund its printing costs and to host speakers such as Jonah Goldberg,
George Will and Daniel Flynn, author of Why the Left Hates America.
Baehr says such speakers are necessary to counterbalance the influence
of an overwhelmingly liberal faculty, many of whom he believes exhibit
left-wing tendencies in their course materials. Don't conservative
college professors also indulge their biases in the classroom? "I'm
sure there are equally absurd cases on the other side," Baehr says,
mentioning the faculty at Bob Jones University.

Although conservatives currently run the national government and are
enjoying an upswing in media influence, conservative activists on
campus still draw energy from feeling like a beleaguered minority --
and they're not entirely wrong. In last year's American Freshman
Survey, conducted annually by the University of California, Los
Angeles, 27.8 percent of college freshmen nationwide identified
themselves as liberal or far left while 21.3 percent identified
themselves as conservative or far right. It was the first time since
1996 that the percentage of students identifying themselves as liberal
or left in the survey decreased; the year before, 29.9 percent had
identified themselves as liberal or far left, the most since 1975.

Liberal dominance is more pronounced at elite schools. Dartmouth is
widely considered to be the most conservative school in the Ivy
League. And yet, according to a voluntary e-mail poll by The
Dartmouth, the school's student newspaper, 62 percent of students
voted for Al Gore in 2000 compared with 23 percent for George W. Bush.
At Princeton, generally considered the second-most conservative Ivy,
55 percent voted for Gore compared with 26 percent for Bush, according
to a 2000 poll by The Daily Princetonian (of which I was then editor
in chief). At the University of Pennsylvania, probably the third-most
conservative Ivy, 67 percent chose Gore while 20 percent chose Bush,
according to The Daily Pennsylvanian.

If these broad measurements -- liberal versus conservative, Gore voter
versus Bush voter -- were the only campus trends that mattered to the
future health of progressive politics, liberals would be in reasonably
strong shape. But unfortunately for progressives, college politics are
more complex. I recently spoke to about 30 student leaders at
universities throughout the country. Their perspectives on campus
activism varied from school to school, but most agreed that though the
right is still a minority on many campuses, it is undoubtedly an
energized one. Like Steward and Baehr, conservatives are often fueled
by two forces: their own sense of righteous indignation at professors,
administrators and peers whom they believe have made college campuses
inhospitable territory for conservative ideas; and the availability of
funding from outside organizations, which allows them to channel this
indignation into publications, speaker series -- and, they hope,
converts.

The siege mentality of campus conservatives and the substantial
financial support they receive from outside groups have not escaped
media notice. In May, The New York Times Magazine published a story
about the rise of "hip" conservatives at Bucknell University. The
Economist followed with a shorter piece in July on the growth of
College Republicans, which has tripled its national membership in the
last three years. "The leftists who seized control of the universities
in the 1960s have imposed their world-view on the young with awesome
enthusiasm, bowdlerising textbooks of anything that might be
considered sexist or racist, imposing draconian speech codes and
inventing pseudo-subjects such as women's studies," The Economist
wrote, offering a concise illustration of the current conservative
mind-set on many campuses. As a student from Pennsylvania State
University told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette while attending a Young
America Foundation conference in Washington this summer, "Our group is
much smaller than the college Democrats, but at least we are making
our voices known."

Campus conservatives have made the most of their self-conception as an
oppressed minority. Their insurgency is just a natural "reaction
against the professors and the administration, which tend to be
liberal," says Dan Gomez, chairman of Penn's College Republicans.
Alicia Washington, president of Yale University's College Democrats,
agrees. Yale conservatives, she says, "knock a lot louder because
there are so few of them." And if conservatives find that knocking
louder helps them generate publicity, well, that's part of the point.

By contrast, campus progressives, though still more numerous, have two
big problems: funding and fragmentation. Yoni Appelbaum, who led the
Columbia University organization that dispenses funding to student
groups and worked with the nonpartisan Columbia Political Union (CPU),
said the disparity was noticeable. "It was far easier for us at the
CPU to locate external sources of funding to bring conservative
speakers to campus than it was to locate sources of funding to bring
Democratic speakers to campus," he says. The funding gap manifests
itself in more subtle ways, too. "The liberal magazines don't look
anywhere near as nice as the conservative magazines," says Emily Regan
Wills, a senior at Yale and a leader of the school's Women's Center.
Zac Frank, president of Columbia's College Democrats, marvels at the
outside support available to conservative groups. "The national
network they have is just astounding," he says. That national network
serves as a pipeline for young conservatives, and it has churned out
its share of success stories: Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and, most
famously, Karl Rove all held national positions in the College
Republicans organization.

The number of progressive campus groups often dwarfs the number of
conservative organizations, but that is both a strength and a
weakness. Harvard's Web site, for instance, displays numerous student
groups running the gamut from liberal to radical: the Environmental
Action Committee; AIDS Education and Outreach; the Bisexual, Gay,
Lesbian and Transgendered Supporters Alliance; the Black Students
Association; the Black Men's Forum; the Coalition Against Sexual
Violence; the Coalition for Drug Policy Reform; the Harvard-Radcliffe
Women's Leadership Project; Youth at Harvard Against Handgun Violence;
Students for Choice; Amnesty International; the Initiative for Peace
and Justice and so on. The conservative counterparts are much fewer in
number. This phenomenon exists at many schools, and on some campuses,
student leaders say, the proliferation of liberal groups can lead to
divisions in the progressive community.

It's not simply the number of organizations that matters -- the
ideological range of progressive groups tends to be much wider than
those on the right. That fragmentation can be healthy, of course --
what is college about, if not debating ideas? -- but it can also
create bitter and disabling divisions, particularly at schools with
strong cultures of radicalism. Ethan Ris, president of Brown
University's College Democrats, says that this past spring the Young
Communist League took over efforts to organize protests against the
war in Iraq. "We would show up to these meetings and be shouted down
and called idiots ... . My members would show up and have such a
terrible time, they'd never want to go again." Yale's Wills -- who is
herself no centrist; she voted for Gore only because she lived in the
swing state of Pennsylvania and would have voted for Ralph Nader
elsewhere -- says the progressive community often ends up being
dominated by its most extreme voices. "I am shocked often by what I am
called moderate for saying," she says. "And 'moderate' in the activist
community is a dirty word." Describing some activists as "hard-line"
and "off-putting," she adds, "People who get committed to Yale
activism often end up being very far to the left."

At Columbia, a school with a long tradition of radicalism, liberal
students say that the vocal student chapter of the International
Socialist Organization (ISO) has a chilling effect on more mainstream
progressive activism. "I've met freshmen who've been wary of joining a
political group because what they see on campus are these far-left
groups who are not their cup of tea," says Samir Arora, who just
graduated from Columbia and was president of the CPU. Frank, of the
College Democrats, says, "People see any identification with
progressive issues as being, 'Oh, that's the ISO again.'"

Progressive students engaged in narrowly focused organizations may
ignore liberal electoral politics. "Sometimes it's difficult to work
with single-issue groups," says Gerard McGeary, president of Harvard's
College Democrats. Alicia Washington of Yale agrees that the strength
of identity groups "in some ways does kind of detract." But other
campus liberal leaders see identity groups as valuable gateways to
political awareness for students who might otherwise remain on the
sidelines. "It's a big group of people to get our message out to,"
says Rich Eisenberg, president of Penn's College Democrats.

Another problem for the liberal side is durability. Single-issue
liberal organizations often ride on the energy of a handful of
students and may not outlive their graduations. Changes in world
events may also make narrowly defined groups obsolete, scattering to
the wind the political energy they briefly harnessed. Groups that
sprang up to oppose the Iraq War this past spring are a prime example.
"Things form as news forms, and then they die as news dies," Lucretia
Fernandez, press secretary of Indiana University's College
Republicans, says of some progressive groups on her campus.

Still, campus conservatives say that the sheer number of liberal
groups gives progressives more opportunities to lure students to
campus activism. "Any sort of liberal issue has a group at Penn, as
opposed to the conservatives, who, as of now, have us," says Gomez of
Penn's College Republicans. With more groups, he says, "you can
mobilize so many more people, even though they may not be united by a
common leadership." As a result, conservatives at Penn and Princeton
say they are trying to emulate the left by encouraging the formation
of new right-of-center political groups more narrowly tailored around
specific issues.

A bigger nemesis for both groups is a familiar one: apathy. Getting
the message out about political issues is a particular challenge when
great swaths of the student body aren't listening. To have a
conversation with current college students about political activism,
it's practically a precondition to acknowledge that many students
simply don't care about the great debates of our time, or don't think
that political engagement is worth the trouble. There is, of course,
some sample bias at work here: It makes sense that the average
activist would view his or her peers as politically apathetic, just as
the typical cellist would probably view other students as
insufficiently interested in attending orchestra concerts. And yet it
is impossible to avoid the fact that conversations about politics at
colleges big and small, liberal and conservative, urban and rural,
private and public invariably turn toward the fact that "the majority
of students are apathetic," as Josh Fisher of the Bucknell Caucus for
Economic Justice put it in speaking about his campus. Asked whether
students at Bucknell are generally left or right of center, he says he
doesn't know. "I couldn't say definitively because most people avoid
topics of conversation like that," he says. "It's sort of an
anti-intellectual environment." Katerina Seligmann of Columbia's
Amnesty International chapter acknowledges that most of her peers are
politically left of center. But, she adds, "There's a difference
between people being liberals and people being activists."

Cutting through this apathy is the greatest challenge faced by campus
activists, left and right -- and possibly the one idea that unites the
two sides. "When we're registering people by ourselves, we get 10
people per hour," says Eisenberg of Penn's College Democrats. "When
we're registering with the College Republicans, we get 50 people an
hour." Gomez, his Penn counterpart on the right, says that debates
between the two groups -- which take place once or twice a year --
draw "the most participation of any one event that either of us do."

Humor is another way to coax students out of apathy, and a little
effort goes a long way. Conservatives have been out in front on this
one, probably because it's easier to poke fun at the establishment
when you perceive yourself as being outside it. The New York Times
Magazine documented how Bucknell conservatives have made a rite of
annually penning something called "Penis Monologues," a response to
the feminist play The Vagina Monologues, popular on many campuses. The
stunt generates outrage and publicity, which is exactly what
conservative students want.

Liberals may be watching and learning. Shortly after this year's State
of the Union address, Peter Hackeman, opinions editor of The
Bucknellian, the student newspaper, wrote a satirical draft of Bush's
speech that wasn't bad. "Our intelligence sources tell us that Saddam
has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for
nuclear weapons production," he wrote, "but they were actually to be
used for those low-tech phones with string connecting two aluminum
cans... . Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities.
He clearly has much to hide. Just what are these string-and-can phones
to be used for? If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning." Not as
outrageous as the "Penis Monologues," to be sure, but give Bucknell's
liberals points for effort.

The Iraq War was fertile ground for campus activism on both sides of
the political spectrum. But most students agree that national politics
in the last two years has moved into territory where campus
conservatives feel more comfortable than their liberal peers. "It
became a lot easier to be a conservative at college after September
11," says Angel Rivera, president of Indiana University's College
Republicans. Following the terrorist attacks, groups with names such
as the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism and Columbia's Students
United for America sprang up. Though many of these groups had
bipartisan memberships, they clearly leaned right.

Many see this trend not as evidence that undergraduates have converted
to neoconservatism en masse but rather as a manifestation of how
contemporary college students feel about institutions -- such as the
military -- that were largely opposed by their parents. In the most
recent nationwide UCLA survey, 45 percent of students agreed
"strongly" or "somewhat" with the idea of increasing military
spending. In 1993, that number was 21.4 percent. Supporters of the
Iraq War understood this situation. At Columbia, for instance, the
College Republicans chapter was careful to advertise its rally as a
"pro-troops" event rather than a "pro-war" one, explained Dennis
Schmelzer, the organization's executive director. "The war in Iraq has
been a great issue for us," says the group's president, Ganesh
Betanabhatla.

A debate raged at the school over whether to bring the ROTC back to
campus. And some liberals -- revealing, perhaps, the inclinations of
their generation -- have found it difficult to dismiss the arguments
of their more conservative peers. Dina Schorr, a founder of Toward
Reconciliation, a Columbia group that advocates peaceful resolutions
to international conflicts, struggled with the question of whether to
sign a petition advocating the ROTC's return. "If all of these liberal
campuses don't have ROTC," she explained, "then how can you expect the
military to change?" In the end, she signed.

On social issues, however, college students remain generally liberal.
"Social issues [are] really our best shot among young, educated kids,"
says Owen Conroy, president of Princeton's College Democrats. Whatever
else characterizes today's college students, this is surely the
Tolerant Generation. The percentage of students supporting gay rights
has consistently grown in UCLA's survey in recent years. Last year a
record high of 59.3 percent supported gay marriage while a record low
of 24.8 percent favored laws limiting homosexual rights. It is well
documented that students are growing more ambivalent about ever having
an abortion or personally approving of one, yet recently a majority
still favored abortion rights. And 39.7 percent support legalizing
marijuana, up from 16.7 percent in 1989. "It's definitely harder to
sell them on socially conservative ideas," says Gomez of Republican
efforts to enlist Penn students.

Whatever frustrations Gomez has experienced haven't sapped his sense
of mission. Last year, to spark interest in their group, Republicans
put up signs around campus that asked, "What Would Reagan Do?" When
many were torn down -- as campus posters often are -- Gomez took it as
a sign of anti-conservative bias. "If there were posters saying, 'What
Would Carter Do?' they wouldn't have gotten torn down," he says. The
deeply held belief that they are being persecuted on college campuses
may make some conservatives seem a little paranoid. But it may also be
strengthening their resolve.

College liberals confront a paradox: their parents won many aspects of
the battle for campuses some decades ago -- freer sexuality,