Almost daily Corner bashing
Stanley Kurtz is befuddled:
The University of Virginia boasts some excellent conservative-leaning professors and seems to have lately become a destination of choice for the children of some Washington area conservatives.
Kurtz goes on, in an unusual rhetorical twist, to point out that UVA is actually not all that different from other, conspiratorially liberal, colleges:
he school remains in many ways a typically biased left-leaning college. Therein lies an interesting tale.When some conservative freshmen decided to form a "Burke Society," they were opposed by the student council. It took the intervention of FIRE to vindicate the right of conservatives at the University of Virginia to freedom of association. The whole incident seems to have taught a valuable lesson to the campus as a whole. Recall that the University of Virginia is one of the schools that have recently adopted a highly problematic "bias reporting system," also being energetically opposed by FIRE.
It’s obviously too early to recommend the University of Virginia as a clear alternative for conservatives, although it’s certainly worth a look. With luck, the courageous conservative pioneers there now will smooth the way to a future where students and professors with either conservative or liberal political views can feel welcome and free.
One minor geographical insight Kurtz may have missed, though, is that a great deal of the "Washington area"--especially as far as conservatives are concerned--is in Virginia. Which is just to say that it's no surprise that Virginia's major public university is the destination of choice for some Virginians. I'm also told that plenty of Michigan conservatives attend the University of Michigan.
Meanwhile, if a school's political leanings really are that important to "Washington area" conservative parents, the obvious place for them to send their children is the Metro-accessible George Mason University.
Comments
Metro-accessible? I don't think so. The Virginia Square facility is basically the law school. The main George Mason campus in Fairfax County is miles from where Metro will ever be.
Its still closer than Charlottesville.
I went to UVa, grew up in Virginia and am black. I wasn't overly politically active while I was an undergrad, but I would say, at the time, that the school (or at least the cohort of students I had the most interaction with) was generally conservative (though I am a liberal). However, as an international relations major who also took a lot of government classes, I never felt like I was getting a line pushed in my direction one way or the other. The student demography certainly lends itself to a general conservative leaning (lots of kids from NC, Georgia, Tenn, Kentucky, Miss and Alabama plus the children of Republican Bobo's from NY and NJ). The fact that the school was all male up until the 70's and the importance of legacy admissions might play into that as well.
Furthermore, and maybe this has changed since I was there, the student body at UVa is fairy politically apathetic (which is a stark contrast to Berkeley, our frequent competitor in the U.S. News Rankings). We care more about keeping our kegs than anything else. Ha.
I'd agree that Mason makes more sense if you want to get your outright conservative fill, though.
I don't know much about the faculty at Washington & Lee, but it's probably the most conservative student body in the state, IMO.
Kurtz's retelling of the Burke Society story omits key facts. The proposed Burke Society would have limited membership to persons with conservative viewpoints, and would have required new members to be approved by a two-thirds vote of existing members. The UVA student council voted down the proposal on the understanding that those kind of membership restrictions violated school policy. Within about a week, after having been advised by UVA's attorneys that membership restrictions based on viewpoint were permissible, the student council approved the organization. That is something less than an anti-conservative jihad.
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