The conservative college student: Politics or Civility?

August 18, 2010
Scott Jaschik

ATLANTA -- The oppressed conservative student is a regular theme in the right's critique of higher education. You know the stories -- mocked for displaying the American flag or a Ronald Reagan bust, shouted down for suggesting that that Iraq war is just, always in fear of earning a low grade for criticizing affirmative action or some other widely held belief among the left-leaning campus majority.

Research presented here Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association affirmed that many conservative students feel that way, but also that many do not -- and that the latter group in fact thrive on the very campuses that tend to be portrayed as hostile to them.

The difference, the research suggests, isn't the relative size of the conservative minority or the commitment level of the more liberal majority. Rather, campus characteristics -- many of them most commonly associated with small liberal arts colleges, and harder to pull off at large universities -- may be the determining factor. In fact, one suggestion from the research that might distress fiscal conservatives is that low student-faculty ratios may contribute far more to the comfort of conservative students than would efforts to promote ideological "balance" on a syllabus or in a department. the rest