An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups:
Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers under 18; $3 for 19-year-olds; $1 for 20-year-olds; 25 cents for 21- to 39-year-olds; and free to those 40 and over.
“Don’t get screwed by Social Security, support private accounts,” says Mr. Sorba, a conservative activist who has come here to Bentley College’s Student Union to help recruit new members for a chapter of Students for Saving Social Security.
“Social Insecurity Bake Sales” are only one of the stunts they employ, and the article follows Mr. Sorba around through a couple of other efforts, and describes the origin and funding of the movement to recruit student conservatives. It’s an interesting read (though you should look quickly, as that’s a time-limited email link to the story).
I suspect that, as a good liberal faculty member, I’m supposed to be outraged, but honestly, my first reaction is “Good.”
Not, I hasten to add, because I agree with any of the positions Sorba and his colleagues support. In fact, the causes described range from the merely stupid (Social Security privatization) to the thoroughly loathsome (Sorba is working on a book with the spittle-flecked title: “The Truth Is Finally Coming Out of the Closet: The Born ‘Gay’ Hoax, the Dangers of Homosexual Behavior, and the Law of Nature”), and a few of their activities have a signficiant element of bullying to them. I don’t think the causes they advocate have any merit to speak of, but I think that the fact that they are advocating them is useful for the rest of the students.
The holding of progressive positions has become rather perfunctory on campuses over the last, oh, thirty years. It was certainly well entrenched by the time I was in school, to be sure, and hasn’t really weakened in the last fifteen years. Students can generally be relied upon to espouse progressive values and support progressive causes not so much because they have carefully considered their positions, but because that’s simply what one does.
I’m not claiming some sort of Horowitzian “liberal faculty brainwash their students” thing, here, just noting that the culture of most college campuses leads many students to a sort of unthinking warm-fuzzy progressivism. Many students will express tepid support for environmental causes just because you’re expected to do that sort of thing every now and again. They don’t put any more thought into why they should support those causes than they put into why they get drunk and run naked around campus landmarks– it’s just part of being a student.
To the extent that people like Mr. Sorba can get students to think about what they’re doing, they can be useful. I’m not just speaking hypotehtically, here– when I was in college, a good friend of mine was one of the campus’s few avowed conservatives, and I spent a lot of time arguing politics with him. He never really got me to change any of my positions, and Lord knows, I didn’t get him to budge (but then, he was a national debate champion in high school– I counted it as a victory if I could get him to agree to disagree), but those conversations forced me to think about why I took the political positions I did, and I think I’m a better person for that.
In the end, then, I’m not particularly outraged at the stunt tactics of conservative student recruiters. On balance, they’re probably a good thing (save when they cross the line into intimidation tactics like “Wanted” posters and red stars on faculty doors), because a lot of progressive college students and student organizations have become a little bit complacent in the past few decades, and could stand to be shaken up a bit. And if the actions of groups like the one that funds Mr. Sorba cause progressives to beef up their own organization, well, that’s even better. And, indeed, the article ends on what I would consider a very hopeful note:
“There is a whole generation of conservatives in their 30s, 40s, and 50s that are the product of this conservative farm team,” says David Halperin, senior vice president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “On the progressive side, the leaders are often the same people that founded progressive organizations in the 70s, and that’s an imbalance.”
To close that gap, left-leaning organizations are fighting back, forming their own groups to train the liberal leaders of the future.
Two years ago, Mr. Halperin’s center formed Campus Progress to do just that. In 2006 the program awarded $120,000 in grants for campus issue campaigns and progressive publications, and it has just started a field program aimed at what the group sees as the country’s most conservative campuses, including the College of the Holy Cross, Duke, Florida A&M, and Vanderbilt Universities, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Mr. Halperin, director of Campus Progress, says progressive organizations have neglected students for too long, lulled into complacency by the belief that most students are already on their side.
Good for Mr. Halperin. In fact, here’s a link to Campus Progress, because organization is good.