“It says here you’re from Texas,” my interlocutor said. “You don’t like Bush, do you?”
“Oh, uh … well, does it really matter either way?”
“But you don’t like him, right?”
It was my first week in New York. Captivated by the glamour of the city and the unorthodox mission of the tiny Christian college I was entering as a freshman, I had gone out hopefully looking for a source of income. This interview took place at a retail children’s clothing store on Thirty-fourth Street. I didn’t get the job.
My first week in New York and the flop interview coincided with the 2004 Republican National Convention. Delegates inside Madison Square Garden were chanting “Four more years!” while protesters filling the streets of my new neighborhood shouted phrases I couldn’t understand. I headed home from the children’s store, weaving through gay rights activists and ducking under coffins carried by the marchers.
What was this world I had entered? I came from Dallas, Texas, where everyone I knew really did love Bush. Growing up there, I had gone to private classical schools, studied Latin, and learned the Texas state song (“Texas, our Texas, all hail the mighty state!”), which modestly described my homeland as “Boldest and grandest, withstanding ev’ry test, O Empire wide and glorious, you stand supremely blest.”
That wide and glorious empire was far away now. I had moved to a blue state; I had moved to New York City.
I came there to go to the King’s College, a Christian school in the Empire State Building. I didn’t know then that I would meet my future husband that week and that I would stay in the Northeast after college. Today I live in Jersey City, New Jersey, and work as a writer for the National Association of Scholars, an organization seeking to preserve intellectual freedom in American higher education.
One thing that surprised me when I first started at King’s was the political enthusiasm of some of my freshman classmates. A group of guys I knew went into the protester-packed streets wearing shirts that read BUSH IS MY HOMEBOY—they said they wanted to get into debates with the Bush-bashers. As part of new student orientation, the college took us on a field trip to the youth section of the RNC. Several from our group spotted news cameras and immediately put themselves forward to be interviewed. It seemed everyone around me felt strongly one way or the other. As for me, I figured I was a Republican, but that was by association with my family and my Texas roots, and other than being against abortion, I really couldn’t articulate my political beliefs.
But I liked the feisty spirit at King’s College, planted in the heart of New York to be a countercultural force. The college’s mission—to prepare students for and plant them in “strategic institutions” —resonated with me. It wasn’t a typical Christian college tucked away in a rural town with mandatory chapel and a no-drinking pledge. Nor was it typical of college in general. As a student there, I lived in a mouse-ridden Midtown apartment building with doormen and no thirteenth floor, wore business clothes on campus, and had classes interrupted by terrorism alerts over the Empire State Building intercom.
This felt more authentic—to be “in the world,” not apart from it. I wanted to be where ideas were born and where I could have my own nebulous ideas take shape.
Today I identify with the principles of the intellectually conservative movement for which I work. I believe that higher education colors the contact lenses through which we see the world. It can either bestow our civilization’s legacy or prompt us to reject that legacy. I saw this illustrated around the breakfast table this past Christmas when my extended family got into a heated discussion over government regulation and one uncle passionately defended farming subsidies and the health-care bill. “How did he get to be so liberal?” my father-in-law asked later. “He went to the University of Maryland,” said Grandma.
I, on the other hand, came out of college appreciative of the free market, concerned about big-government initiatives, and wanting to build my life on traditional values. My husband and I hope to populate the earth with a few little conservatives. And my public writing in my job reflects the convictions of people like Allan Bloom, whose The Closing of the American Mind sometimes seems like the NAS’s Magna Carta. (Not that NASers are generally Platonists or Straussians. They represent a great variety of views, united mostly in opposition to the intellectual imperialism of the Left.) At twenty-three, I am a junior culture warrior learning to take a stand for sound education in an academic world saturated in political correctness and anti-intellectualism. So how did I get to be so conservative, and remain so while living in the heart of the secular liberal Northeast?
The main fortifiers of my beliefs have been my family and my education. Growing up in a Christian missionary family was foundational. My father read the Bible to me during breakfast every morning before school, and my mother instituted a weekly family night on which we would all say something kind to—she called it “honor” —one person at the table.
We went as a family to Russia once or twice a year with my parents’ humanitarian aid ministry and visited orphanages, schools, hospitals, and prisons. My first trip was in January of 1995, when Russia was still in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. I remember entering a gray concrete school building and giving a shy Russian girl my best friendly American smile. She looked at me blankly. I later asked my father why she didn’t smile back. “After seventy years of Communism in Russia, people don’t have much to smile about. They need the hope of Jesus,” he told me.
I also went to Cuba as a twelve-year-old on a mission trip for which the Cuban administration had made a special exemption. During the orientation in Mexico, I was instructed not to talk about the government or why we were there—even the hotel phone might be bugged. In Cuba I saw worse poverty than any I had seen in Russia, and I met underground Christians gathering in homes. They offered my group their month’s pittance of a meat ration and served a salad topped with vegetables cut to spell DIOS ES AMOR.
Both snowy Russia and sweltering Cuba were covered by the same dark cloud of Communism. My parents wanted me to see this darkness for myself so that I would appreciate the freedom I own as an American.
When I began looking at colleges, King’s was their suggestion. Picturing myself studying serenely on a grassy Washington & Lee-esque campus, I had no desire to go to school in cold, metal Gotham. And I thought the King’s admissions people too bold asking questions like, “Where do you see yourself in five years? How about ten years?” How should I know? But a visit and a scholarship later, I changed my mind.
On move-in day, there was a sign on my apartment door that said HOUSE OF MARGARET THATCHER. My roommates and I were confused until we learned that King’s had created a system in which all students are assigned to one of nine houses, named for conservative or Christian heroes such as Ronald Reagan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Queen Elizabeth I—to the exclusion of such icons as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Rorty, and John Maynard Keynes.
In a 2005 National Review Online article, Stanley Kurtz called King’s “a fascinating experiment in higher education—an ultimate encounter of red and blue America.” True, the college was made up mostly of conservative Christians, but it wasn’t trying to cultivate, like cattails in the Sahara, Republicans in New York. Rather, the experiment was to approach education differently from most American colleges: teaching students to pursue truth—and acknowledging that there is such a thing as truth in the first place, though finding it was not presumed to be easy or simple.
My major at King’s was modeled after one at Oxford: Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PP&E). It was a liberal arts program that began with Plato and Aristotle and ended with a senior thesis. Down in the basement of the Empire State Building, I sweated over microeconomics charts and heard for the first time that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” an unfortunate truth to find out for a college student living in the most expensive city in the country. I took Philosophical Apologetics from Peter Kreeft, a nimble seventy-year-old Catholic philosopher dedicated to the writings of Socrates and the seasons of the Boston Red Sox. The final exam for that class was to write sixty arguments for the existence of God.
I took rhetoric—better labeled Learning to Write through Mortification—from my current boss Peter Wood, then the provost of the college. For the class, we wrote op-ed-style papers on current events. We had to use a five-syllable word in the first sentence—an exercise aimed at making us slow down and think about the exact words we were using—and were graded on our use of metaphor and “imaginative realization.” Each week we had to integrate a new figure of speech, such as a zeugma, enallage, or aposiopesis. The class was called rhetoric, as in the classical art of using language to persuade, not the modern connotation of obscuring the truth. The syllabus said:
The art of persuasive writing can and often is put to bad use, in efforts to justify unworthy behavior and misguided political agendas. In that sense, this course differs dramatically from rhetorical communication courses as they are taught in many colleges and universities. This is not a course in how to shade the truth, to lie with statistics, or to persuade people against their better judgment. To the contrary, it is a course in how to persuade people to improve their judgment and to listen to reasonable counsel.
In class we had to project our papers on a screen and read them out loud to our classmates. Dr. Wood asked each person to give a critical comment (no positive remarks allowed) and coaxed us, with Socratic method, to talk about whether the word “dogged” worked in a metaphor calling Harriet Myers a pit bull, or whether the paper had succeeded in its aim. It was a humbling class; my first paper earned a whopping 43. And it wasn’t easy, listening to my friends and professor pointing out the mixed metaphors, lack of evidence, and poor word choice in my writing. But rhetoric taught me the importance of words, sentences, and figures of speech in formulating an argument.
For my senior thesis, I examined the permissibility of abortion for pregnancies caused by rape. I analyzed Judith Jarvis Thompson’s “Defense of Abortion” and considered reasons why conservative politicians typically make the rape exception. My advisor was David Tubbs, a true scholar who taught Statesmanship with Shakespeare plays and Public Policy with texts by Robert George, Hadley Arkes, and Rochelle Gurstein. His seminars prompted me to think about some of the biggest policy issues of our time. When I wasn’t secretly tallying the number of times he asked someone in the class to “Be more specific,” I weighed various arguments for reparations, the implications of legislating morality, Captain Vere’s decision to execute Billy Budd, and whether a nonreligious case could be made against gay marriage.
In all my courses, professors urged the class to compare competing arguments and seek the most accurate one, to see ideas in the context of the historical whole. Conservatism was never forced on us, and I know people who have graduated from King’s as hippies, Democrats, or staunch libertarians believing that God is a free-market capitalist. For me, the texts I read and the concepts I thought about in college reinforced some of my beliefs, knocked others to smithereens, and gave me some new ones.
And just keeping up with the pace of my course load was a struggle. You get out of college what you put into it, and I surely could have gained more by working harder and actually reading everything assigned to me (I didn’t). Running around the city on nannying jobs and spending time with friends and my future husband were welcome diversions. I know I have much more to learn. King’s, too, had its limitations, with only two majors, one sporting event per year, and an enrollment small enough that the entire school knew who you were. Like other students there, I inevitably wondered what it would be like to go to college somewhere else. Yet I stayed.
I was meeting with Dr. Tubbs for my thesis one day when he told me that Peter Wood, who had earlier that year left King’s for the National Association of Scholars, was looking to hire someone and wondered if I was interested in an interview. I went home, looked up the NAS, and read that it was a Princeton-based organization that fights political correctness in higher education.
King’s and my primary education had kept me sheltered from the liberal worldview projected in most classrooms. I was never taught that the universe came about through evolution. I was never taught that global warming was real. I was never taught that capitalism was exploitative, that America was an oppressive society, that I was a racist because I was white, or that I should reexamine my heterosexuality. I’d heard the ideas; they just didn’t make much of an impression. My schools never passed out condoms, asked me to consider being a Safe Zone ally, or taught me how to calculate my carbon footprint. I never read Beloved, Silent Spring, Nickel and Dimed, or A People’s History of the United States. I never watched An Inconvenient Truth or Fahrenheit 9/11. These films and books may all be excellent in their own way, and perhaps I’ll get around to them one of these days, but first on my list are Love’s Labour’s Lost, Anna Karenina, and G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.
I hadn’t experienced the liberal campus for myself—although I got a sample the day of my interview on 34th Street—but because of what I had learned, I could see why it didn’t fit in with higher education. I had learned about the great thinkers and principles of politics, philosophy, and economics. I had been to Russia and Cuba and seen for myself the bitter inheritance Communism bequeathed to those countries. And I had studied debates over the right to privacy, racial preferences, and freedom of expression. I was already aligned with the NAS’s values and had practically lived its vision of the ideal university.
I went to Princeton for an interview and got the job this time. Within the next month, I graduated from King’s, got married, moved across the Hudson to Jersey City, and started my first real-world job.
One of my first assignments at NAS was to write the story of Bill Felkner, a social work student at Rhode Island college who faced years of persecution on account of his political views as a libertarian. Having attained a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the college, and encouraged by one of his professors, Felkner began pursuing a master’s degree in social work. In his first semester in the School of Social Work, he wrote a class paper arguing against a social welfare bill. The assignment was to advocate for the bill, but Felkner trusted that he would still be graded fairly no matter what position he took. But his trust was in vain: his professor gave him an F accompanied by the comment, “Regardless of the content, application of theory, and critical analysis, you did not write from the perspective you were required to use in this academic exercise. Therefore, the paper must receive a failing grade.”
In the same semester, Felkner objected to the School of Social Work’s promoting the film Fahrenheit 9/11, including showings in social work classes. He e-mailed his professor to point out that the film was politically biased and that it had nothing to do with social work. The professor wrote this in reply:
I revel in my biases. So, I think that anyone who consistently holds antithetical views to those that are espoused by the profession might ask themselves whether social work is the profession for them.
Felkner also met with the chair of the bachelor social work program, who told him, “We hope that all social workers are liberal.”
Writing this article and talking with Bill, I had my first encounter with the ugly side of higher education—one that tries to shut out all who decline to cheerlead for the Left’s agenda. I’ve learned since then that universities love to pitch their tent on misleading terms, such as “diversity,” meaning special privileges for people in particular identity groups; “social justice,” meaning advocacy of state-sponsored redistribution; “global citizenship,” meaning hatred of America; and “sustain-ability,” meaning anti-capitalism and population control in the name of environmentalism.
My generation goes to college mainly because it’s culturally accepted as the natural next step after high school. College is, for us, a transition from living at home, a place to play, and a time to grow up. Most of us don’t really know what we want to get out of college (friends? memories? vocational skills?) and we just hope to find some sort of niche where we feel comfortable. But college has the power to be so much more than this—to crystallize ideas and make us who we are.
The content in which we invest—books, lectures, conversations, extracurricular involvements, declarations by those in authority—shapes how we view the world. Of course, not everyone automatically adopts the perspectives of their college. Many people I’ve talked with, like Bill Felkner, resist the culture of conformity to progressive politics. For instance, I’ve gotten to know Sylvia Wasson, a warm and fearless woman who teaches German language at Santa Rosa Junior College in California. After she spoke out against her college’s clandestine efforts to put racial preferences (illegal in California’s public institutions) into policy on her campus, she was labeled a troublemaker and a racist. The college commissioned an investigative report vilifying Professor Wasson and made it available for public viewing. She remains disfavored at her college for challenging its subversive endeavors to install racial preferences.
There are others I have talked with via e-mail, such as Margaret Matthews (not her real name), an assistant director of student affairs at a university in the South. She contacted me asking for advice on how to document the folly of her university’s commitments to “diversity.” She wrote an article for NAS telling about a meeting she had with the vice president of student affairs. In the meeting, she asked to transfer to a new department and was told there would be difficulty “finding another black woman to replace you.” Matthews had hoped to use her expertise in an area other than the office of multicultural affairs, but she had already been labeled. “There I was, just one person sitting there, but she was seeing a group.”
I also know Bill Rivers, a boyish-looking, articulate honors student at the University of Delaware. He was astounded when he had to participate in a mandatory freshman residence life program that aimed to teach ideological lessons about racism and oppression. In one session, Rivers recalled, students were told to write down all the racial epithets and slurs they could think of. Instead of bringing the white freshmen to repentance for their biases, the exercise only embarrassed everyone and caused them to focus more on racial stereotypes than they otherwise would have. Rivers told his professor Jan Blits, the head of the NAS Delaware affiliate, about the program, and Professor Blits worked with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to gather documentation and expose the program. The University of Delaware president immediately shut down the program.
Bill Felkner, Sylvia Wasson, Margaret Matthews, Bill Rivers, Jan Blits, and people like them are my heroes. Like boulders in a hurricane, they remain unmoved in their convictions, even if they face retaliation for doing so. If I had gone to a secular university, I hope I would have had courage like theirs. Their stories make me grateful that I never had to make a choice between compromising my beliefs and being bullied for expressing them.
Yes, the 34th Street retail-store manager didn’t look too kindly on me when he suspected I liked President Bush. But I never faced discrimination in college. Perhaps that store manager inadvertently gave me a push toward my becoming self-consciously conservative. He started me on the path to the realization that the affinities we feel, the choices we make, and the ideas we entertain reverberate in the wider cultural atmosphere. We can let that happen through happenstance—avoiding unpromising confrontations and practicing the equivalent of ducking under the coffins carried by protesters on 34th Street. Or we can make thoughtful choices about when and how to speak up.
An all-too-frequent “entertainment” at the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue was a guy with an assortment of plastic buckets. He would set up his own drumming exhibition, taking advantage of the canyon formed by the Empire State Building and adjacent buildings. His clunking message got plenty of amplification. What was that message? I suspected it was mostly to the storeowners, and was something like, “Pay me and I’ll move my concert somewhere else.”
Speaking up for the sake of making a noise, attracting attention because you can, banging on plastic buckets—adding to the cultural cacophony—is not the kind of reverberation I would like to make. But if I can help bring attention to Bill Felkner’s fight against his “I-revel-in-my-biases” professor, or the attempt of Santa Rosa Junior College to smear Sylvia Wasson, or Margaret Matthews’s thwarted hopes, that’s something. Conservatives need to conserve a lot of things. One of them is a decent sense of how to convey worthy grievance. The great model for that is the Declaration of Independence, but I am mindful, too, of the many smaller models of people standing up, at some personal risk, to local tyrannies. Higher education has been too long conceded by mainstream conservatives to the Left, and it has consequently grown into a world where the Left often rules with such florid arrogance that George III himself would have been embarrassed. I see in the university an institution that is far too important to our civilization to surrender to these folks. That’s what I’m trying to conserve.