Or more precisely, what it’s like to be to be among the small, sometimes microscopic, minority of conservative undergraduates on most college campuses at present. It’s the focus of this piece in today’s IHE, which takes its cue from this book just published by Princeton University Press.
IHE reporter Colleen Flaherty thinks some people sure do get exercised over this topic: the “conservative critique” of the contemporary academic landscape, she writes:
can read like a zombie apocalypse story: Young Republicans must watch their backs at all times, or fall prey to the brain-eating (liberal) life form that pervades higher education.
I actually haven’t seen any zombie/liberal brain eaters recently, but it sounds like a great sci-fi theme. Watch this space and I’ll let you know. It’s certainly indisputable that you can’t turn in too many directions on campus these days without bumping into liberal objects of one kind or another, as I noted here recently.
The book looks worthwhile though since, as the article indicates, the authors became interested in the experience of conservative undergraduates as a largely unexplored facet of collegiate life. Such students, they conclude, have some unique trials to surmount but still don’t wish they had taken refuge in a conservative ghetto either. They apparently enjoy the intellectual challenges that inevitably confront them.
Too bad that the vastly larger liberal majority will simply be confirmed in their own assumptions.
