WATERVILLE, Me. — Conservative media outlets have built a cottage industry of outrage on the premise that conservative students are victims of a “tyrannical” campus left. I know this message well, because over a decade ago, as a conservative student at Bucknell, I helped devise and spread it.
I am now a much more liberal professor. In the early 2000s, as I watched conservatives embrace the Patriot Act after Sept. 11, reject marriage equality and insist on authority over women’s reproductive health decisions, the libertarian streak that brought me to conservatism began pulling me to the left. But I still care deeply for the liberty of my conservative students. For this reason I have some advice for those in college who are concerned about their freedom of speech.
I was a reasonably good-natured kid from a modest Catholic household when I showed up to my liberal arts campus. Then suddenly I wasn’t me, the individual. I was just white. It seemed that everyone was celebrating diversity and multiculturalism, and I didn’t see a role for myself in that. It occurred to me, as it has to countless other conservative students, that I might also be a kind of minority — an “ideological minority” — because of my conservative political views.
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Aaron, you are one funny guy!
ReplyDeleteI agree with a lot in this article. Conservative voices were being diminished in the 80s when I was in college...in part because they were as hateful as the left is today. As with others, life has a way of opening eyes and changing opinions. Personally, I'm glad to see a softening of attitudes towards gays and people of color within the GOP in large part thanks to Trump. We should be uniting around a philosophy or approach to life instead of identity.
ReplyDelete10:01 we don't need to be uniting around softening attitudes about lgbt or people of color, that is the problem, we need to be uniting because we are Americans. the lgbt community and black community are dividing us in radical ways. the leftist are rioting because they did not get their way. this needs to stop.
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