College Students Are Veering to the Right

Re “The Left Loses College Kids,” Commentary, Jan. 28: Those darn liberal intellectuals at our universities. I agree with Brian C. Anderson that nothing is going to change soon. The faculty remains a solidly left-wing body for good reason. Does it occur to him and the born-again reactionaries on our campuses that those liberal professors are liberal because they’re intellectual?

Marlene Dempster

Ventura

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There’s a danger in being the status quo, and I think Anderson’s commentary shows it. From 1999 to 2002, I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. When I first arrived, I proudly labeled myself a liberal; three years later, my politics had moved to the right -- still liberal, but now “center leaning left.” And I wasn’t the only one.

Let’s face it, the old left has lost its spark. From John Kerry circa 1969 to John Kerry circa 2004, it’s been a long way down. The entrenched leftist power structure of academia has gotten lazy, comfortable and, as a result, mostly irrelevant. Once upon a time, they were brave individuals challenging an unjust system. Now they are the system. And a new generation of students is challenging them.

To be honest, I think that that generational play is a major theme in the greater struggles of the Democratic Party in 2005 and beyond. But that’s for another day. I think the old UC Theater put it best, “Berkeley: Once Important, Now Quaint.”

Matt Mireles

New York

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Conservative thought in America is not what it used to be. Courtly and erudite voices such as William F. Buckley’s have given way to the ranting demagoguery of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Buckley’s own National Review, which used to publish such literary greats as Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport, is now a sort of bulletin board for partisan talking points. Allan Bloom’s truculent classic “The Closing of the American Mind,” published only 18 years ago, is already of a different era.

If you want impassioned discussion of the classics these days, you go to the (liberal) New York Review of Books; our neoconservatives are in too strong a swoon of military and economic triumphalism to be much worried about the decline of humanism. And Republican concern for educational reform is aimed more at removing Darwin and evolution than reinstating Plato and Aristotle.

So when Anderson reports the increasing presence of conservatives on campuses, and concludes that “anyone who cares about the education of our children -- and the future political discourse of our country -- can only cheer,” I heartily agree. His gleeful image of a 100-student strong Harvard gun club “blasting away” gives pause, but if the other numbers he cites indicate that conservatives want to rejoin American intellectual life in a serious way, that sounds like a good thing.

Curtis Brown

Cambridge, Mass.