No Safe Spaces for Conservative College Students
A majority of these young conservatives find their political views are not welcome on campus.
OneClass conducted a recent survey of more than 1,500 students from 207 schools, finding that 55% of students who identified as Republican said their political beliefs were not welcome on campus, whereas only 16% of Democrat students felt their political views were unwelcome. Furthermore, the polling showed that 37.5% of Republicans did not feel safe expressing their political views, which was “three times more” than Democrat students.
In writing about the polls, Jerry Zheng noted, “The fear of being cast with damning labels and feeling ostracized is genuine for conservatives on campus. It’s also why 55.1% of Republicans are closet conservatives who don’t tend to share their political orientation with their friends. For Democrats, being part of a college campus that mostly shares their views could be what contributes to feeling accepted in inner and wider circles.”
And if recent history is any indication, conservative students do have reason to be wary, after a leftist attacked a conservative on the campus of UC Berkeley, just to note one example. Thankfully, physical violence is not the norm on America’s college and university campus. However, the survey confirms that students are increasingly subjected to a blatant anti-conservative bias from both fellow students and, more significantly, from school faculty and administration — which, by the way, tilt 10-1 leftist. OneClass’s survey seems to further support the findings of Harvard’s 2017 poll of Americans age 18 to 29, which revealed that only 25% felt safe sharing their Republican views on campus.
Far from celebrating actual diversity — the diversity of thought — the American college-campus culture is fast becoming a homogeneous blend of a postmodern, neo-Marxist ethics in which only leftist dogma is allowed to be freely confessed. Any counter perspective is seen as threatening and must be silenced.