Middle America's Worldview

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Conservatives Make New Push on College Campuses
Posted by Bobby Eberle
November 30, 2005 at 7:13 am
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It has long been known that left-wing thinking dominates the environment of America’s college campuses. In poll after poll, professors have identified themselves in overwhelming numbers as "liberal." Now, one group is stepping up to counter the liberal indoctrination with a dose of conservatism.

As covered in the Agape Press's story Delivering the Conservative Message to Combat Campus Liberal Bias, a new group known as the Network of College Conservatives "vows to expose and combat liberal bias on university campuses."


The Network of College Conservatives has been launched to provide a voice for students who are being harassed, intimidated, or even shouted down on campus because of their conservative or "right-wing" beliefs.

Christopher Flickinger, the founder of the Network, says its goal is "to help those students get a well-rounded education" because, "they’re certainly not going to get it from their professors in the classroom."

Flickinger needs all the help he can get. According to a story earlier this year in the Washington Post, "College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says."

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Another study sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in 2002 found that today’s college campuses are not "diverse" places. "Quite the opposite: They are virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems. They are utterly flightless birds with only one wing to flap. They do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America," concludes the study.

Liberals outnumber conservatives 18 to one at Brown University. At Cornell University, the number is even higher, with liberals outnumbering conservatives more than 26 times. Penn State displayed a bit more balance, with the ratio of liberals to conservatives being six to one. Even the smallest disparity, at the University of Houston, had a ratio of three liberals to one conservative.

Despite this stark imbalance, liberal groups, driven partly by fear and partly by outrage that conservatives are now starting to make inroads, are stepping up their funding. Earlier this year, Howard Kurtz, in the Washington Post, noted that one liberal Washington think tank was "funneling money to universities to encourage liberal journalism." Kurtz asks, "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?"

"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."

Hmmm… liberals overwhelmingly dominate the two major institutions of academics and the media and yet conservatives "run the world." If it were only true! The fact is that conservatives need to step up their efforts to reach college students. This is a crucial time in a young person’s development, and liberal professors and interest groups have a virtual monopoly on what is being fed to these young and inquisitive minds.