This piece was first published in our news digest, The Front Page. To get our latest scoops, investigations, and columns in your inbox every morning, Monday through Thursday, become a Free Press subscriber today:
Is getting harassed by other students evidence of an effective college education? How about getting indoctrinated by professors? Or slandered on social media?
No? None of these? That would put you at odds with an Atlantic essay published Monday that attempts to frame experiences like these as examples, according to its title, of “How Liberal College Campuses Benefit Conservative Students.”
The essay was written by Lauren Wright, who teaches at Princeton. She argues that conservatives at predominantly liberal colleges get “exposure to different perspectives, regular practice building and defending coherent arguments, [and] intellectual challenges that spur creativity and growth.” Wright says these are benefits that liberal students have been “robbed” of. And she says that right-wing critics of these schools are missing something: that it is conservatives, not liberals, who reap “what higher education has long claimed to offer.”
As a right-of-center undergraduate at Columbia, I take Wright’s point. I have certainly derived some benefit from living and learning on a campus where vanishingly few students identify as conservative. I have developed “thick skin” and emerged “more resilient”—two of the benefits cited by Wright. But that doesn’t make up for facing a hostile environment on campus because of my mainstream political beliefs.
For reporting on Columbia’s anti-Israel protests and the occupation of Hamilton Hall for the Columbia Sundial and The Free Press, other students, including many in student government, slandered me on social media. Others yelled at me on the street. One particularly charming Columbian screamed “Fuck you” and gave me the finger. For the most part, I have been able to shut all this out and remain focused on my reporting. But these experiences don’t feel like an “educational advantage.”
When Columbia professors attempt to indoctrinate and radicalize students in support of Palestinian extremism, it’s inevitable that pro-Israel students will feel “challenged” in class discussions and develop valuable argumentation skills. That does not mean we should applaud these professors for their intellectual beneficence.
Wright argues that it’d be a mistake for conservatives to abandon elite colleges. I agree. But the intolerance conservative students like me are forced to endure is nothing to celebrate.
Jonas Du is an intern at The Free Press. Read his report on how protesters at Columbia had their criminal charges dropped. Follow him on X @jonasydu.
This has been going on for at least a quarter century. In the late 1990s, at Rutgers University, I also experienced these "benefits" of being in the conservative minority. The issues were different back then, but I can remember getting an F on a "reaction" (read: opinion) paper in PoliSci because my opinion was too conservative. I was a straight-A student and wasn't about to let some liberal professor's bias ruin my GPA, so I escalated the matter. The dept head (also extremely liberal) was on the teacher's side, so I appealed to the dean. The end result was a "compromise": While the other students only had to write five of the six assigned papers (they could choose which one to skip), my F paper would count as my 'skip' and be dropped.
In other words, I had to write six papers while everyone else only had to write five. (My grades mysteriously improved after that, and I ended up with an A in the class.) I guess this aided in my development of thicker skin and resilience?
On the bright side, the dept head insulted me in the following manner: "Your paper reads like something written by William F. Buckley," she sneered. "Thank you!" I said, brightening considerably. I then proceeded to write a letter to Mr. Buckley about it, and he printed it in the next issue of National Review!
Something has happened in the last 40 years or so. I remember the hostages being held by the Iranians in 1979. I was in my Junior year of college and all of us college students were supremely pissed off that a country would do this to our citizens. The dorm put up a big sign saying "Nuke Iran" which they soon made us take down.
These days the students would be rioting for Iran to keep the hostages and that the American people "deserved" it.