Radical Backlash on College Campuses

Conservative student movements are growing in power and popularity on college campuses - at least, they call themselves "conservative." In reality they are more radical than conservative because they pursue a radical agenda, not unlike that of leftist radicals during the 1960s.

Joshua Holland writes in Gadflyer:

[B]eyond anger, the defining characteristic of cultural populists is that they view themselves as victims of murky forces operating behind the scenes. And just as they'll pass their adulthoods convinced they belong to a silent majority that's repressed by a covertly liberal media, they go through their college days believing a biased faculty is trying to force a hidden lefty agenda down their throats.

In fact, liberal bias in the academy is a fiction based on the same sort of selective analysis used to "prove" bias in the media. While there are certainly plenty of liberal professors, never mentioned are inherently conservative departments like economics, right-leaning frats and student groups, the influence of campus ROTC or the fact that for every left-leaning Vassar or Oberlin there is an equally conservative Washington and Lee or BYU.

Instead, the focus is on departments like sociology or ethnic and women's studies where there's a lot of progressive thought. In those departments conservatives collect liberal professors' statements, take them out of context and use them to weave a circumstantial case of bias. The goal is not to promote diversity of opinion but to convince people that our nation's universities have been hijacked by, as the title of one book put it, "tenured radicals" who brainwash our youth with their crypto-socialist ideology.

Unfortunately, many students buy into the myth. For a generation raised on the reactionary polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, more intellectual brands of conservatism – those based on Hobbes, Hayek and Friedman – are often unrecognizable; they appear solidly centrist to today's backlash youth. And once you're convinced that the university is a virtual liberal re-education camp, then every slight and inconvenience of campus life becomes further proof of the malevolence of the Left.

This is a “radical” backlash precisely because traditional conservatism on campus is so often ignored, just as Holland states above. There are lots of examples of intellectual and political conservatism on college campus (more on some, less on others naturally), but not lots of examples of radical right activism or support for radical right beliefs. People looking for conservatism look for Rush Limbaugh, not Burke or Hobbes, and are disappointed when they find that the likes of Rush just aren’t given much consideration in academia. So, they complain — but they do so unjustly.

Part of the problem lies with conservatives themselves. Who else is responsible for the development of the anti-intellectual conservatism of people like Ann Coulter which has displaced the more intellectual conservatism of people like Burke — or even Buckley, for that matter? If contemporary conservatives had done a better job at emphasizing their own intellectual traditions and heritage, we probably wouldn’t find people like Coulter and Malkin being so popular.

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