February 2003 – Students who attend most American colleges and universities will hear plenty about the word “diversity,” but behind that word is a growing, single-minded intolerance toward anything resembling conservative political beliefs or traditional morality.

Public attention was drawn to this trend in 1998, when civil libertarians Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate wrote The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses. Kors, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Silverglate, an attorney, presented scores of examples that demonstrate a strictly enforced heterodoxy of belief that often leaves conservatives – and especially Christian conservatives – on the philosophical fringes.

In an interview with USA Today, Kors said the engine of this new dogma was a behind-the-scenes cadre which “operates in the shadows, with ideologically driven orientations, judicial systems, behavioral codes.”

On many campuses today, young people entering student life are forced to attend orientation sessions that teach more than simply where to buy textbooks. According to a World magazine exposé, colleges and universities are forcing students to sit through what Kors called “Thought Reform 101.”

For example, in its policy on harassment, made available to incoming students, World’s Lynn Vincent found that “Arizona State University labels a student’s religious objections to homosexuality as ‘offensive’ and ‘shocking’ on par with supporting Hitler, slavery, and apartheid.”

Rather than the college or university standing in loco parentis (in the place of parents) as has been traditionally thought, Kors says educators are now standing “in the place of private conscience, identity, and belief.”

At the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), for example, students participate in Across the Line, an orientation program that World says has also been used at Stanford University and Loyola University. Groups of students start off along a line on the floor, while an orientation staff member begins reading off a list of 50 statements. When a student feels that one of them applies to himself, he steps across the line. Statements include things like, “You are pro-choice,” or “You feel comfortable around persons with a gay, lesbian, or bisexual orientation.” Obviously, conservative students who would be left behind would feel enormous pressure either to deny their moral beliefs or be subjected to the silent disapproval of the rest of their peers.

MSOE Director of Student Activities Rick Gagliano admitted to World that Across the Line is meant to ensure that student “attitudes are … readily challenged,” and that students are “forced to expose” their beliefs to their peers.

Other orientation professionals also make their motives painfully clear. Wartburg College diversity issues coordinator Marcus Newsom said, “I really want [freshmen] to understand that they are no longer at home, they’re not in high school anymore, and a lot of the values and morals they may have had from those experiences may change here over the next four years.” 

Silverglate said this process has succeeded in silencing most of the students who disagree with the accepted dogma on campus. “You don’t hear about [political correctness] because it has triumphed. Students don’t complain. There were a few lawsuits in the beginning, won by the students. But students aren’t challenging that anymore,” he said.

Even when conservative students dare to speak out, leftist radicals react with a vengeance. According to a National Review article, for example, a pro-life group that acquired a permit to hold an on-campus rally at the University of Texas was disrupted by a bullhorn-wielding professor. When students immediately tried to get help from campus officials, they were refused.

Robert Jung, editor of the university’s conservative student paper, Contumacy, spoke with Deputy President Jim Vick about the disruption – and about the school’s inaction in the face of it. “I spoke with him about our concerns that the free-speech guidelines weren’t being enforced and that what the liberal activists were doing was against the rules,” Jung said. “He told me ‘a policy decision had been made’ not to enforce the guidelines.”

If Jung was surprised, he shouldn’t have been. Conservative college newspapers often find themselves the targets of reprisal on campus, with copies of papers stolen, defaced, or destroyed. 

Contumacy is one example. “Every time we publish we lose 30% of our papers” to theft or vandalism, Jung said, adding that complaints and police reports go nowhere.

On the Tufts University campus, National Review reported that, within a four-month period, the conservative student paper The Primary Source lost 4,300 copies to theft and 600 to vandalism. Even after campus police were able to identify one of the groups responsible for stealing copies, university officials refused to act. 

At the University of Florida, the conservative student paper, The Gator Standard, found it difficult to get political science professors to comment on current issues. One professor told a reporter, “I don’t have anything against your paper, but the department told me I am not allowed to talk to anyone from The Gator Standard.”

The American Enterprise reignited the debate with a cover story on the subject of campus diversity in its September 2002 issue. In an insightful essay, Karl Zinsmeister zeroed in on a national survey, conducted by the magazine, which used local voter registration records to determine the political party affiliation of professors at 21 colleges and universities. The study found that in all surveyed schools, professors who were registered with political parties of the “left” (Democratic, Green, or Working Families Party) vastly outnumbered professors who were registered with political parties of the “right” (Republican or Libertarian).

Other studies illustrate the same glaring lack of diversity. A survey of 151 Ivy League professors, commissioned in 2001 by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, found that only 3% self-identified as Republicans, while 57% were Democrats. As The American Enterprise noted, that hardly reflects the general population, where the political spectrum is almost evenly divided – 37% Republican, 34% Democrat.

The American Enterprise also observed that, in the same survey, 0% of Ivy League professors characterized themselves as “conservative,” while only 6% said they considered themselves to be “somewhat conservative.” On the other hand, 30% said they were “somewhat liberal” and another 34% called themselves “liberal.”

Rather than being “diverse” places, Zinsmeister said the evidence indicates that college and university campuses are quite the opposite. “They are virtual one-party states, ideological monopolies, badly unbalanced ecosystems,” he said. “They are utterly flightless birds with only one wing to flap. They do not, when it comes to political and cultural ideas, look like America.”