Fraters Libertas

Spring's Hope Eternal

Last night, Hugh Hewitt was predicting that we're going to see some major demonstration, reminiscent of the Vietnam era protests, from anti-war groups this spring. King Banain agrees and thinks that college campuses will once again be a focal point:

I'm listening to Hugh now and he's absolutely right: This will be the spring of peace rallies. It's the one hammer they have left, and they will use it. They will not go to sleep. They will continue to pound away on Iraq, on Afghanistan, and elsewhere. And the campuses will work right along with them.

Not a very pleasant prospective for the season of rebirth. But this time around, the colleges may not be quite the hot bed of activism that they were in the '60s and early '70s. At least not the same kind of activism. As Brian C. Anderson explains at OpinionJournal:

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no.

Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.

The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.

The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of America's college scene lately they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. Parents, critics note, spend fortunes to send their kids to top colleges, and then watch helplessly as the schools cram them with a diet of politically correct leftism often wholly opposed to mom and dad's own values.

But the left's long dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers.

More good news:

Other conservative organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard's has more than 100 students blasting away) to impudent newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools everywhere--even at Berkeley, crucible of the 1960s' student left. And right-of-center speakers invited by these clubs are drawing large and approving crowds. "At many schools, those speeches have become the biggest events of the semester," Time magazine reports. One such talk at Duke, by conservative author and former Comedy Central host Ben Stein, attracted "a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier."

In fairness, I have to wonder how many of those kids turned out just to see if Stein would say, "Bueller?"

The new-millennium campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture, as I've found interviewing 50 or so from across the country. A favorite TV show, for instance, is Comedy Central's breathtakingly vulgar cartoon "South Park." "Not only is it hilariously uncouth, but it also criticizes the hypocrisy of liberals," explains Washington University economics major Matt Arnold. "The funniest part is that most liberals watch the show but are so stupid that they're unaware they're being made fun of," he adds, uncharitably. The young conservatives, again like typical college kids, also play their iPods night and day, listening less to Bach and Beethoven than to alt-rock, country-and-western and hip-hop.

Young conservatives like South Park? Imagine that.

What accounts for the growing conservatism of college students? After 9/11, many collegians came to distrust the U.N.-loving left to defend the nation with vigor. As of late 2003, college students backed the war more strongly than the overall American population. Notes Edward Morrissey, "Captain Ed" of the popular conservative blog Captain's Quarters, these kids "grew up on . . . moral relativism and internationalism, constantly fed the line that there was no such thing as evil in the world, only misunderstandings." Suddenly, on 9/11, this generation discovered that "there are enemies and they wanted to kill Americans in large numbers, and that a good portion of what they'd been taught was drizzly pap."

Captain who?

Anderson concludes his piece by recognizing that campuses are still predominantly left wing institutions:

Conservatives still have a long, long way to go before they can proclaim the left's control over the campus broken. The professorate remains a solidly left-wing body, more likely to assign Barbara Ehrenreich than Milton Friedman, Michel Foucault than Michael Oakeshott, and nothing, not even David Horowitz's indefatigable activism, is going to change that soon.

But at least these days there is reason for optimism:

Nevertheless, thanks both to enterprising students and groups like ISI and SAF, the left's iron hold on academe is beginning to loosen. Anyone who cares about the education of our children--and the future political discourse of our country--can only cheer.

Even though it's a long piece, I would encourage you to read the whole thing. It gives one hope that maybe our college campuses won't be the centerpoint of anti-war protests this spring.