Jon at Shifting Sand posted a link to an interesting article on the rise of conservatism on college campuses. Thanks also to Jen at Boston Commoner for her thoughts on her college choice in her post linking to Jon's original post.
The reporter, Brian C. Anderson, managed to get some quality quotations --Quote is a verb, remember -- and I can only imagine his enjoyment as he coaxed them out of the students.
Here's a teaser from the story.
Today’s right-leaning kids sure don’t look much like the Bill Buckley–style young Republicans of yesteryear. “Conservative students today will be wearing the same T-shirts, sneakers, and jeans that you find on most 19-year-old college kids,” says Sarah Longwell of the Delaware-based Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which promotes the Western intellectual tradition on campuses. Jordana Starr, a right-of-center political science and philosophy major at Tufts, tartly adds that you can spot a student leftist pretty fast: “They’re the ones who appear not to have seen a shower in some time, nor a laundromat.”
And another...
Katherine Ernst, a perky, blond, and diminutive recent NYU grad, confirms the point. Like many students I queried, Ernst already leaned right when she arrived on campus. But the left-wing propagandizing of her professors made her conservatism rock-solid. “One professor, right after September 11, gave a terrorist-sympathy speech that went, you know: ‘Oil, oil, oil, they’re poor, we take advantage of them, it’s really complicated, blah, blah, blah.’ It was something that I and many other students living in our financial-district dorm really enjoyed,” Ernst says acidly. “The worst professor I ever had, though, was for a course in administrative law,” she recalls. “Every class—no exaggeration—included at least five references to ‘Bush was selected.’ ” A final straw for Ernst came when a professor—“a for-real communist”—walked out of a class he was teaching “to take part in some stupid protest march.” So there you have it, says Ernst: “You pay thousands and thousands and the prof takes off to carry a no justice, no peace sign around Union Square Park. How could anybody exposed to this kind of stuff not become a raging right-winger?”
I love the last line of that last extended quote. "How could anybody exposed to this kind of stuff not become a raging right-winger?” So collegiate.
Posted by JRC at January 19, 2005 06:58 PM | TrackBack