Why liberals should recruit conservatives to Columbia

In the fall of 2006, shortly after a group of Columbia students stormed the stage at a campus event promoting the “Minuteman Project” to combat illegal immigration, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly made headlines in Morningside Heights by labeling Columbia “the University of Havana, North.” Columbia students laughed it off and moved on, but for O’Reilly’s three million nightly viewers, the jab reinforced the image of Columbia as a notoriously “liberal” institution—a fixture of the Upper West Side, an eager host for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the school that trained our “socialist” president.

Columbia’s defenders are quick to note that the University has also produced Republicans such as Pat Buchanan and George Pataki, and that Columbia’s faculty is no more progressive than that of peer institutions. In reality, though, Columbia’s professors are strikingly liberal: Between 2004 and the present, members of the political science faculty have made 23 donations, totaling $28,785, to Democratic candidates and committees. Over the same period, they have not made a single donation to a Republican candidate or committee.

For such a “liberal” institution, Columbia lacks the diversity of opinion that should be a basic component of any university’s atmosphere. It is Columbia, after all, that requires its undergraduates to trudge through John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty”—a text that rests primarily on the argument that “the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion.” Surely it is in Columbia’s best interest to promote that variety of opinion, even if it means actively altering the criteria used to allocate University resources or select new faculty members. Think of it as ideological affirmative action.

The addition of conservative faculty would benefit Columbia students of all political stripes. Conservative professors would provide mentors for like-minded students, additional advisers for right-leaning clubs and publications, and opportunities for undergraduates to participate as research assistants in explicitly conservative scholarship. Conservative professors would also force my fellow Democrats to defend their own politics in seminars and colloquia, which in turn would either sharpen their opinions or prompt them to reconsider their own preconceived notions. Mill also argues that anyone who has considered running for elected office will benefit from “being cognisant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, [and] knowing that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them.”

Every Columbia student is invested in the school’s reputation, and it helps no one if consensus opinion holds that Columbia merely provides a niche education designed to incubate and promote liberal thought. That view delegitimizes Columbia as an institution, and it delegitimizes me as its student. Surely we all prefer that Columbia be thought of as a world-class teaching university, a place where intelligent students gather to hone their own beliefs by exchanging ideas with peers of all opinions. We would all benefit—especially the Democrats among us—if Columbia were seen in a less partisan light. But, as it stands now, the Columbia brand is so crudely liberal that it may well blight the hopes of current students who wish to return to their conservative hometowns and run for office.

Concerted efforts toward balancing the faculty will bring enormous benefits at little cost and will not be totally unprecedented. As dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan expressed concern that the school had grown too liberal and launched a successful effort to recruit conservative faculty to Cambridge. Stanford University became affiliated with the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank that has attracted prominent Republicans such as Condoleezza Rice and Edwin Meese to Palo Alto.

In the meantime, smaller changes can be made. The political science department can offer a course on conservative political thought. More money can be funneled to conservative groups on campus. Perhaps Columbia can even create its own Hoover Institution, a unique enclave where conservative research can be promoted and protected in the heart of New York City.

Somehow, somewhere, Columbia must make an effort to combat the stifling dominance of liberal thought on this campus. It is high time for Columbia’s Democrats to follow Mill’s advice and “[seek] objections and difficulties, instead of avoiding them.”

James Dawson is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. He is a Columbia University tour guide. Low Politics runs alternate Tuesdays.