Do Conservatives Control The Campuses?

The Boston Globe has been taking a much-deserved razzing lately for the way it has covered (or not) the controversy over Dan Rather’s Bush National Guard documents. Now it has published an Oped that I at first suspected was Maureen Dowd-like satire but, on painful re-reading, I now think means to be taken seriously.

Ben Hubbard and David Halperin, of something called the Center for American Progress, ask whether students are really “under siege from liberalism?”

Or is “liberal bias” on campus the same as “liberal bias” in the media — a weapon of self-promotion that falsely portrays conservatives as victims of leftist orthodoxy?

A look at campuses today reveals we’ve been duped. Increasingly, it is the conservative movement that sets the agenda.

Let’s leave aside for now the fact that, to hear them tell it, liberals seem to be getting duped a lot lately. Kerry was duped by Bush into supporing the president’s authority to go to war in Iraq; “I, Dan” (see previous post) Rather was duped into accusing the president of being a shirking liar on the basis of documents that now strongly appear to have been forged; and everyone has been duped into thinking campuses suffer from a politically correct conformity of liberal bias.

The evidence for the striking assertion that “it is the conservative movement that sets the agenda” on campuses now consists primarily of pointing out that some conservative organizations spend money on speakers and leadership training, spiced up by the media success of “self-promoters” who engage in the “hijinks” of affirmative action bake sales, which succeeded in their goal of provoking college administrations to repress them.

Pretty flimsy stuff. But even generously assuming, for the sake of argument, that conservative students are in the driver’s seat on America’s campuses, do they really “set the agenda” on campus? Don’t, you know, faculty, administrators, and staff have some small role to play as well? What might their “agenda” be?

David Brooks, in the BG’s sister publication, gave some hints in his column on Saturday:

Eleven academics gave to the Kerry campaign for every 1 who gave to Bush’s…. For librarians, who must like Faulknerian, sprawling paragraphs, the ratio of Kerry to Bush donations was a whopping 223 to 1.

….

If you look at the big Kerry donors, you realize that the days of the starving intellectual are over. University of California employees make up the single biggest block of Kerry donors and Harvard employees are second….

Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession. All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent. Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans.

Perhaps the political preferences of the faculties, administrations, and staffs of American colleges have no effect on the atmosphere or agenda on their campuses, but somehow I doubt it.