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05/24/2003 Archived Entry: "The Young Hipublicans"

NY TIMES ADMITS THERE ARE CONSERVATIVES IN AMERICA: The NY Times has an interesting story on what the paper has dubbed Hipublicans, young people who are proud to be conservative.

The temptation, upon entering Charles Mitchell's dorm room at Bucknell University, is to assume that he's kidding. The doormat features a picture of Hillary Clinton and the injunction, ''Wipe Liberally.'' A vast American flag festooned in red, white and blue Christmas lights adorns one wall, along with a faded Reagan-Bush '84 poster and a small photograph of the cowboy-hatted Gipper himself. The sole concession to any interest outside right-wing politics is a wall hanging of an African jungle scene. ''My nod,'' says Mitchell, an intense 20-year-old history major, ''to multiculturalism.''

Of course, the reporter manages to draw in concerns that conservative activists could "stifle intellectual openness among students." It's the type of thing that only a conservative student could find hilarious to hear. We are marginalized, assaulted and threatened every day if we dare to raise our voices -- would you like me to tell you about the two professors at Laurentian University who announced in class that they were after me for writing a popular newspaper column? -- and we're the ones that threaten intellectual openness. Funny stuff.

Read on.

Replies: 8 comments

Poor Baby! Coddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Richard Mellon Scaife and others to put out magazines calling homosexuals sodomites, you feel like you're being persecuted.

I've never seen such a privilidged and secure group of people feel so threatened. Is this perhaps because campus conservativism is more about irreverence and contrarianism than about ideology? Do campus conservatives really want to live in a Pat Robertson-style theocracy?

Posted by Charles @ 05/24/2003 10:07 PM EST

Your funny because you made me laugh.

Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 05/25/2003 04:38 AM EST

It looks to me that you are the one that feels threatened.

Posted by Cody @ 05/25/2003 06:33 AM EST

Yes, I'm threatened by the perception of liberal bias everywhere it's not. It makes liberals complacent and it makes conservative whinier than they would otherwise be (of course, they'll always be whiny, what with the decline of western civilization because of feminists, immigrants and the new math).

Posted by Charles @ 05/25/2003 01:49 PM EST

Ah trolls...you have to love them.

Posted by Steve Martinovich @ 05/25/2003 02:35 PM EST

You're right Steve. Engaging in this argument will lead to nowhere.

Posted by Cody @ 05/25/2003 03:28 PM EST

Charles, I'm curious, did you even bother to read the article? Or did you stop when you realized you could post a picture on your blog making fun of the conservative college students' haircuts and stone-washed jeans?

If you had read the article, you would note that these college conservatives are NOT crusading for "a Pat Robertson-style theocracy" and for the most part not referring to anybody as "sodomites," the latter a reference to things that appeared in The Dartmouth Review back in the 1980s.

The reason that these groups have to obtain outside funding is that they are so frequently denied money out of the university funds - funds typically dervied from the student activity fees these conservative college students and their parents have to pony up money to pay for. It is not at all uncommon for there to be a host of organizations dedicated to various center-left causes on a given campus while, at most, one College Republicans group. Student senates frequently try to deny funding to such conservative single-issue organizations as pro-life groups, or try to make them add such causes as opposition to capital punishment to their missions.

While you are waxing indigant about "Scaife foundation" money, I don't hear you complaining about the funding of Naderite "PIRG" gropus on campuses across the country that students are automatically billed to pay for unless they specifically opt out. Is there any similar system for conservative student groups? I think not.

The fact of the matter is that on most of these campuses, a majority of the professors, administrators, student government leaders, student activists, student newspaper op-ed page writers, etc. agree with you. Given the fact that liberal ideas are still debated in the rest of the world, I don't think it is exactly outrageous that there would exist an alternative viewpoint. Neither do I think it is bad that these students are coming up with a means to express it.

If you have a problem with conservative student groups obtaining large amounts of funding from outside groups, perhaps your problem should really be with the fact that they have to go outside for funding at all. But I suppose the dissemination of ideas you disagree with isn't a concern of yours. Conservatives are just a bunch of "whiny" people who feel "threatened" despite being "privileged and secure." Never mind that the tone of your own posts recalls a certain saying about the pot and the kettle.

Posted by W. James Antle III @ 05/25/2003 03:40 PM EST

BTW Charles, given you that you seem to be constructing your entire argument around straw-man caricatures of conservative positions, maybe you too would benefit from exposure to a wider range of ideas and debate.

Posted by W. James Antle III @ 05/25/2003 03:48 PM EST