Armed for Battle: 10 Things Every Incoming Conservative Freshman Needs to Know
3. Finding Allies: College Republicans
Even if you’re not interested in ever having a career in politics, it’s good to have a few people you know who support you ideologically. There are over 1,800 College Republican chapters within the College Republican National Committee (CRNC), and they are an incredible resource nationally and locally. Joining College Republicans can involve as small a commitment as simply attending a few meetings to hear a speaker and grab a snack, or a deep commitment to getting involved with campaigns and going to the CRNC convention.
What if you’re going to a school that doesn’t have a chapter? Start one! I guarantee there are other conservatives on your campus who can join you — and you will build your resume by demonstrating your ability to take the initiative for a cause you believe in.
Enjoyably written, but IGNORE #10. Challenging your Leftist Professor’s statements will only bring you sorrow. You’ll become a laughing stock, and you’ll be called out every time the bald professor with a pony-tail needs to make his class laugh. And make no mistake, kids, it’s his class.
You’ll learn more about Leftists and Progressives – and how to dominate a lecture hall – if you keep your damn mouth shut and listen. You can use this knowledge against them, later. Or use it in your blog, now.
If you’re clever enough, try challenging professor pony-tail FROM THE LEFT, but never from the Right. For instance, the socks-and-sandals crowd are often racists and don’t even realize it. Or if he attacks Catholics using, say, Father Coughlin, counter with Dorothy Day. If he praises Obama, cite Obama’s love of drones and extrajudicial executions…
Have fun, but be careful. College is hard work and expensive enough without adding a layer of political trouble to the mix.
Do NOT ignore #10. I think it’s the most important of all.
As you point out, you must be very cautious and not challenge anyone who has the power to hurt you, like a professor whose class you are taking or will likely take. But otherwise you should politely speak up.
My geeky chem-major son is (and always has been) an expert at ASKING QUESTIONS in an innocent, cool tone. Example: When the kids at freshman orientation are duly informed that a boy is committing rape if he sleeps with an intoxicated girl, he dispassionately asks questions. “If a girl is sober and I am drunk, is she committing rape?’ “If drunkenness obviates consent, then will not my being drunk absolve me of crime?’ “Are you suggesting that I should get drunk?” “If a female gets drunk and drives into a pedestrian, is she any less guilty of a crime than a man would be?”
He doesn’t seek to convert anyone. He may not even disagree with the substance of a particular view. (He would definitely agree it is wrong to take advantage of a drunken girl, e.g.) But by asking questions he forces his fellow students to think and often shows them how flimsy the established “wisdom” is. He also breaks the herd mentality and emboldens dissenters.
Another tactic is to bring the questions up in the break-out sessions. Most of those are staffed by Teaching Assistants, who don’t have fifty years of experience smacking down uppity students.
I recall one lecture that was all about how apprenticeships were based in patriarchal oppression. During the lecture, the professor cheerfully smacked down anyone who raise any objections to it. In our breakout session, we has a TA, and , as it turned out, someone who came from a country where apprenticeships are still a common way of learning a trade, and we managed to get a lively discussion going about the difficulties of predicting the future, when a given standard system collapses, and the pros and cons of apprenticeship vrs a university education.
And then, of course, there is the question, “What is a TA but an apprentice professor?”
The key to #10 (IMO) is to get a feel for the person teaching. I recall challenging opinions and having different reactions. No surprise that the one marginal grade I received was from an admitted communist sympathiser to FALN. But other profs did not push back so hard.
Just be a STEM major so you minimize your contact with these Communist scum. And then you can laugh at them when you have a job, and they are living in their parent’s basement.
This article is worthy and likely helpful for many.
BUT…it’s a long fight, and pacing is vital. There’s a lifetime’s work here for many 20-yr-olds, heroic work at that. Somewhere in the mix — as usual, one size does not fit all — you’ll find lots of room (with high entertainment value) for the tactical use of hatred, contempt, ridicule, disgust, derision, satire and smut. Put bluntly, many leftists are now facing a blank wall, often towards the end of a life of nonsense and failure, and just aren’t worth listening to. But they are worth kicking.
Keys are #9 and #10. When dealing with the left, it is now far more important to be aggressive than polite. If you’re an oppressed underdog — by definition nearly all conservatives on almost any national campus — most who resolve to get mad and and even will experience a profound sense of satisfaction/achievement if they take on faculty and student lapdogs directly, using their own ‘rules’ against them. The institutions are now vulnerable as never before. Don’t ever challenge your leftist professor, says a cowardly lion nearby. Well, hell no, don a few fashionable OWS clown masks and run him out of town on a rail, on camera, tarred and feathered.
Somewhere along the road, today’s young — truly ‘spes gentis’, the hope of the people — will link up with fellow-travelers in older generations; certainly, that includes tea parties and many, many others, including military and law enforcement.
The future may involve 1/ canceling all fed funding for universities whose liberal arts/soc science faculties make it to a well publicized shit-list; 2/ diverting all funding for defense-related and strategic research away from suspect institutions; 3/ going to work on the most target-rich environment of all, the Dept. of Education.
Who among us believes Romney is up to any of this?
This is a long, long war, so dig in.
When dealing with the left, it is now far more important to be aggressive than polite. If you’re an oppressed underdog — by definition nearly all conservatives on almost any national campus — most who resolve to get mad and and even will experience a profound sense of satisfaction/achievement if they take on faculty and student lapdogs directly, using their own ‘rules’ against them.
In the real world, if your major is in STEM subjects or other hardcore knowlege-based fields, the above approach adds an immense burden to a student’s daily workload. For not only do you have to invest all the hours required to do well in your ‘hard’ subject matter, but IN ADDITION you must invest all hours necessary to keep up on current events and political trends and talking points, in depth – as if politics were your major. Your opponents live and breathe leftist politics, and you’ll be insufficiently armed to fend off their pre-packaged verbal eruptions unless your political awareness is on the same order of magnitude as theirs.
The average STEM student likely got to college by investing hours in subject matter, rather than in ‘social justice’ ephemera and political tactics. This creates a big handicap in trying to aggressively debate politics with practiced masters of such disputes.
Are you your own form of portable satire? Assuming you’re serious, your approach is a losing formula likely to keep conservative students passive, reactive and on the back foot. Those who define ‘real world’ to mean keep-your-head-down/survival/retreat are unlikely to be treated seriously by their children, for good reason.
Any student worthy of the name who is majoring or headed for any combination of politics, philosophy, economics, history, law, or even journalism and some of the squishier ‘media studies’ offerings, is fully capable of active participation — and will get lots of help from others. And are you saying that engineering/IT students are incapable of getting involved?
The woman who wrote this article is talking about students whose lights are on and who expect more than community-college-level instruction. If you’re talking about the nearly illiterate canon-fodder whose only purpose on campus is to enable the recycling of student loans to faculty coffers, well, you may have a point. But the future isn’t in their hands and never will be.
Todays schools and universities are “ground zero” in the war on liberalism. As long as these leftist professors and teacher’s union thugs have first crack at today’s young minds, it will be an up hill struggle. I enjoyed this article because it does give us hope that in spite of these obstacles, the truth will be told to those who are ready to hear it. So thanks for these insights and keep up the fight. If a student wants to go to school where they will be celebrated as a free thinking person, try Hillsdale and definitely subscribe to Imprimus and come to grips with our founding documents.
Best
TG
If you can’t go to Hillsdale, then at least try
11) When you do find a right-of-center faculty member in the liberal arts (and we ARE out there), tell as many of your friends as possible about our classes and how much you learned. The more students we reach, the weaker the barricades of the Left become. But more importantly, when students begin flooding our sections, it does begin to make one or two of the Flakey Ones ask why.
I write about education, K-12 and higher ed, and just finished a college search for one of my kids. Here’s a little of the advice I gave her.
1. Take the classes that will really make you learn to write well. As higher ed turns more and more to a focus on credential attainment, it is pressuring profs to do group projects and give credit for things like twittering.
If you have the ability to write you will stand out to every employer in an email world.
2. Subscribe to http://cafehayek.com/'s email feed and gradually teach yourself how economics really works. Mathematical modelling of assumptions will give you no insights into starting your own business or working for others.
3. If you are still picking out a college, especially if it is a high-profile school, try to determine if it’s emphasis is on changing you-your values, attitudes, and beliefs–or transmitting knowledge. Also doublecheck this in the programs you are interested in. You may read the course guide in English or history and discover it will be nothing like you expect.
Or even be worth paying for.
“Mathematical modelling of assumptions will give you no insights into starting your own business or working for others.”
Should the “no” in that sentence actually be a “new”?
Knowing your history is THE most important thing for both students and adults. You can’t go wrong if you have the facts on your side and if you can back up your beliefs with facts. People may try to shout you down, but it doesn’t make them right. Prove them wrong. Do your reading and stick with the facts. You’ll never go wrong doing that.
As an amateur historian I would agree that history is important but I would not agree that it is THE most important thing. Two centuries ago the artist, Joshua Reynolds, clearly identified the most important thing when he said, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
I always made it my main aim when I was teaching English to get my pupils to think deeply and reason carefully.This is crucial for meaningful political discussions. While is it important for a historian to find and work from primary sources, he still needs to weigh these sources (some are more reliable) and to assess them – this brings us back to the primary thing namely thinking deeply and reasoning carefully.
This is why Reynolds described thinking as “real labor” as hard work. This is the best way to expose the gobbledygook of politicians and the failure of many TV presenters to have full control of interviews by insisting that the questions they ask are actually answered. This is something dishonest, manipulative politicians hate.
Two questions:
1)How did the Marxists take control? I’m not just talking about the colleges, they also control high schools, grade schools, law schools, gubmint offices, federal & state agencies, the pulpit, the newspapers, and the televisions stations, except one: Fox, which is a RINO outfit, which ain’t much help.
2)What percentage of matriculators will read this piece, or anything like it? One wonders if such control, this broad system of established and active ideological opinion-programming control, is known of and acknowledged by our forthcoming collegians, let alone the general population.
I have been writing about how the Race to the Top grants and the Common Core national standards are actually a ruse to finally enact all the elements of outcomes based education. Just like the Clintons initiated in the 90s but never completely finalized.
This is what OBE looks like in higher ed.http://www.newleadershipalliance.org/images/uploads/committing%20to%20quality.pdf
Notice all the references to attitudes, values, and dispositions as “learner outcomes.” Also notice this is about credential attainment for all, not knowledge. Sounds like the old Soviet system where the only differentiation in salary available in that centrally planned and managed economy was differences in degrees obtained.
I think the references to democracy and responsible citizenship will look a lot more like John Dewey’s proposed America than the one envisioned by our Constitution.
Other suggestions: Conceptualize ALL liberals as murderous stalinist scum itching to turn the US into Cuba and murder you in a Gulag.Next, buy an assault rifle(always a nice graduation present)get some training, join the NRA,and contribute to their war chest as much as you can;nothing makes a libtard unleash his rabid inner stalinist han gun ownership.Finally,agitate for the creation of an armed wing in every conservative organization, to be activated in case the liberal plutocracy decides to declare a national emergency and suspend the constitution.We will never succeed,until the government(always a liberal instrument) becomes afraid of the wrath of an armed and organized people.
A simpler solution is to major in engineering.
Engineering courses keep the politics to a minimum.
Unless the curriculum and pedagogy in the school of engineering are being determined by the dean of the college of education. That’s happening in several of the state systems I track.
There is an organized effort to change the nature of all the hard science introductory courses to allow for equitable outcomes among different groups and genders. No I am not kidding.
It is part of the AACU’s Making Excellence Inclusive initiative that there be no disproportionality of results involving minorities or gender or even rural students without a solid science background. Literally changing the nature of what is to constitute math, engineering, and science to gain equity and allow access to ALL students.
The thing about engineering is that it is impossible to politicize while remaining useful. Engineering is strictly constrained by reality, even moreso than hard sciences like Physics. Why? Because Physics allows speculation about things that haven’t been discovered yet and searches for them, while Engineering is focused on making stuff work. Politics won’t change the structural properties of steel or the nuclear properties of plutonium.
I’m an engineer and I am lucky to get the opportunity to work with summer interns every year. These poor kids are the target of some of the most insidious of indoctrination techniques. The Marxist have turned engineering into a group-think process.
BTW, open any modern engineering text. The first chapter will be on a subject such as “Social Responsibility”
The Marxist have turned engineering into a group-think process.
I knew a gal who sat through a series of lectures given by a professor in a physics-related mathematics class on the provable correlation between capitalism and misery. What this had to do with quantitative physics was a mystery to the group of advanced grad students.
This was at Cambridge.
The students, including her, were stunned at the irrelevancy and stupidity of the lectures. She had the nerve to object to the Dean and to ask for her money back. She quickly found the best outcome would be for her not to be expelled.
And this is the school that Isaac Newton both attended and worked at. The past tense bears an especially large role in evaluating the level of education these days.
But the Cambridge math professor, she said, was impassioned while delivering his specious lectures, which were actually political speeches with numbers and formulas on the white board, remindful of the baseless fantasies of Scientific Marxism.
After all, one must be caught up in a total state of excitement to wholly let go of truth. We’ve seen this many times in the last 100 years or so, and with increasing frequency.
I did a lot of these thing in my college experience. They are great if you want to become a political activist, and useful if you are a history major or other soft discipline. I found that I needed the time to study. Probably should have working more internships in my field.
I am a conservative English professor in Los Angeles. It’s true that the academy is leftist-dominated, and I am constantly assaulted on all sides by the left on campus, often in racist, homophobic, and anti-veteran terms, with no backup.
But I am tired of listening to conservatives whine about left-wing professors. I have not gotten much support from conservatives, either students or teachers, when my workplace environment grew intolerably hostile. It was two left-wing gay administrators who forced a white colleague to take down posters that mocked Latino servicemembers, so I wouldn’t have to come to work and be ridiculed for my race and choice to serve in the Army. Rarely have conservatives on campus (who do exist, even in small numbers) been willing to intervene; they choose, usually, to be quiet about their views and avoid the fray.
The only way to fix the problem in higher education is for young conservatives to be brave and stick it out in the profession, and also for conservatives to stand by right-wing faculty. This means starting foundations to give right-wing scholars sabbaticals, research grants, and the like, because it is in institutional support where conservative scholars are often most severely disadvantaged. You also need to start legal funds to help conservatives who have to fight bad tenure decisions, and you need to start campaigns in the press to protest when schools discriminate against qualified conservative educators.
Starting a ruckus with left-wing professors in the classroom is one kind of bravery and not to be discounted. But it’s easy to get too comfortable in that scenario without challenging the leftist monopoly, especially in the humanities.
Sadly you are right, Robert Lopez, that many in academia who are on our side stay too quiet. I was in academia for 19 years, and when I did speak out against Political Correctness, I often was the only one. Others would quietly come up to me later and express their appreciation for what I did. It was nice that they did that, but it didn’t help fight the problem.
I can sympathize with those who keep quiet, because you really do risk your job when you go against PC. But things aren’t going to change much until conservatives and others who believe in free speech and academic standards are willing to go more out on a limb openly and together.
On a side note, for someone like me who loves the traditional humanities, its sad to see how so many conservatives seem to give up on those fields, and encourage kids to stay away from the humanities. Its great to be a good engineer or mathematician, but there is also great value in the traditional arts and social sciences. If you’re a conservative high school or college student and you love the arts or social sciences, don’t give up–you might still find your niche and become a great scholar or teacher in those areas. There are others out there like you–it just might take an effort to find them
I agree–supporting students who enjoy the humanities is not a bad thing. One of my freshman composition students has a great love for literature and literary analysis. He is also transgendered. At first I thought he would have an interest in the scholarship of victimhood, but he said he could care less about literary “theories of otherness.” He loves the beauty of literature and wants to revel in it, not pick it apart and assign ulterior motives to it. Yay!
Though he’s not decided on a career path yet, I strongly encouraged him to follow his passion for literature. Maybe he can help rescue literary scholarship from the morass of identity politics.
Yay, indeed, Taxpayer! Any dedicated student with intelligence, dedication and a passion for literature, history, music, art or other such fields should be encouraged by us, not steered into some other field. Our culture needs the humanities, and the humanities in turn desperately needs people who appreciate Western Civilization and are willing to go against the PC tide.
I can’t stand it that so many conservatives have given up on the humanities. We’ll never take back the culture with that kind of attitude.
Whenever students ask me for career advice, I tell them to a)become as well-informed as possible about the target career; and b) if it’s not a money-making career, I tell them to be prepared to work at it part time, for years if necessary. And to be grateful they have the chance to follow their dream at all. I went 20 years between full-time jobs in my field, and I share that cold, hard fact w/them. But I also tell them I gained a lot of skills, made a lot of friends, and learned a lot of things (and paid the bills) along the way. All in all, not a bad thing.
Well said. I especially appreciate that third paragraph, with its practical suggestions of how conservatives can best make a difference.
Yes! Thank you! I’m tired of conservatives bashing the humanities. These are the same folks who complain about a citizenry that doesn’t know its own historical roots, and hasn’t read the founding fathers, etc. Where do you think you get that knowledge (i.e. from Plato and Aristotle to Jefferson, Burke, etc.) but in humanities classes.
My Ph.D. is in English. I went to a variety of highly liberal, east coast, Ivy Leagues/trendy schools. Yes, there was the usual emphasis on theoretical perspectives emphasizing race, gender, Marxist ideology, etc. But you can avoid that kind of thing by choosing your classes, professors, and research topics wisely.
And in terms of jobs and student loans: Most of my English major friends got perfectly fine jobs in a variety of fields–banking, management consulting, publishing, teaching, etc. So the whole “don’t-major-in-loser-humanities-fields-because-there-are-no-jobs-and-you-won’t-be-able-to-pay-back-your-student-loan” argument is worthless.
Profeesor Lopez:
I have great respect for how you have stood up to the anti-conservatives. It is unfortunate that the conservatives do not back you up. I would be careful however about surrendering too much to any one group conservative or liberal in total. It is more important that we focus on “the truth” in academia rather than conservative or liberal. It just so happens that most of what the liberals do believe is a lie and never works in the real world. However take a look at global warming hysteria in the UK and note that both so called british conservatives and liberals both believe these lies.
Good luck and don’t let these idiots get you down.
No. No, no, no. You’re asking the most vulnerable people to challenge the entrenched Marxists of academia, thereby risking their careers. I should know – I was fired after one such confrontation. Rather, society must remodel academia from the outside. Stop all government subsidies – give tuition vouchers to students. Stop your regular alumni donations that perpetuate this aggressive totalitarian regime. Demand that your state legislators and Congress pass the Academic Bill of Rights. Take accreditation power out of the hands of the federal government. Let schools go bankrupt when they insist on hiring innumerable “diversity” staff rather than popular instructors. After this whole program, things may change.
You’re right, Surak. Your program for the future is crucial. PC won’t be defeated until we can shut off the flow of money which keeps flooding into it. “Diversity Staff” have tapped into a big racket, not only in academia but also in the corporate world. And if you take government money, its like selling your soul to the devil.
good lord, on what planet do you live? i used “Regime Change in 2004″ buttons as part of a class project in, oh, 2004, and when announcing to the class what I was up to, there was a chorus of complaint about the buttons and pro-Bush sentiment.
here’s a tip for the college-bound: climb out of the echo chamber; stop feeling like a victim when an authority figure doesn’t espouse your beliefs; be true to yourselves.
Let me get this straight, Micah. Are you saying you were advocating for Bush to be defeated in 2004, in a college environment, and your students complained because they were pro-Bush?
You really should be more mindful of the sentiments of students enrolled at West Point. Or were you at Liberty University? Maybe at Hillsdale?
LOL. The rest of us deal with exactly what this article and commenters are describing. THAT’S the planet we live on, mister.
I think one wouldn’t be allowed to do this at West Point but could be wrong; it was at a Big 10 university. Like I said, stop feeling like victims. They assigned us Burke, and you all are nuts, if you think that Adam Smith doesn’t get his due in every econ, political science, and business department. They had us read portions of “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” in one of our gen ed requirements.
You’re right, Micah. Professors across the country give pro-liberty and pro-capitalism scholars equal due, and it’s pretty common for groups of college students to complain about Bush-bashing. I don’t even know why the author of this article wrote it! It’s not needed at all!
It will be clear from this thread that the problems are across the spectrum. Third-rate teachers with a smug sense of entitlement are found on the right, too.
That’s no surprise, merely an argument for more high-pressure hoses to flush out the stables, the sooner the better.
In regards to “2. Know Your History – of Conservatism,” I recommend George H. Nash’s “The Conservative Movement in America, Since 1945.”
It is an excellent history of the development of conservative thought and its roots. If you want to understand where modern conservatism came from, it is a must read.
Why confine yourself to one way of thinking? I believe it’s important to experience all ends of the spectrum. That way, you can be ready for anything. Conservatism is just a fourth of the fun.