why dave bergman is neat

'W' STANDS FOR 'RIGHT'?: for brian anderson's (quite lengthy) article on the rise of conservatism on college campuses (or 'campi'?), go here. here are the two leading paragraphs:

Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.

The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.

the article contains observations and statistics on a number of issues--military, economic, cultural, etc. for example, according to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, the number of college freshmen who want the wealthy to pay higher taxes is down 16%. support for abortion is down for two-thirds of college students to just over half.

the article also includes this tidbit:

Jordana Starr, a right-of-center political science and philosophy major at Tufts, tartly adds that you can spot a student leftist pretty fast: "They're the ones who appear not to have seen a shower in some time, nor a laundromat."

hey! i resent that! i'm not a leftist!

i thought this was interesting:

"At many schools, [right-of-center] speeches have become the biggest events of the semester," Time magazine reports. One such talk at Duke, by conservative author and former Comedy Central host Ben Stein, attracted "a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier."

there is also a quote in the article from a classics major at cornell!

according to anderson, the growth in conservatism has to do with the lure of the forbidden:

Conservative ideas take on even greater allure for students when the authorities say they're verboten. From pervasive campus political correctness--the unfree speech codes, obligatory diversity-sensitivity seminars and school-sponsored performances of "The Vagina Monologues'--to the professorate's near-uniform leftism, with faculty Democrats outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 (at Williams, it's 51 Dems to zero Republicans), everything aims to implant correct left-wing attitudes in student brains.

"There's a natural and healthy tendency among students to question the piety of their teachers," Penn history professor Alan Kors noted a few months back.

i'm a little confused, though, about the williams statistics. i went to the website and quickly counted well over 51 factulty members--unless they have 51 democrats, 0 republicans, and lots and lots of independents/third party members.

anyway, it's an interesting article if you want to check it out.