Swarthmore College student Danielle Charette, co-founder of the Swarthmore Conservative Society at the decidedly liberal private school, recently offered some advice to her peers on how to run a successful conservative campus movement:
Our work at Swarthmore demands a big-tent approach. This is a strategy that can win popularity on just about any college campus and unite disparate dissenters into one coherent group. Although there may be areas of disagreement, this only adds nuance to our discussions and tests the vigor of our arguments. … We do “fuse” various perspectives that serve a common conservative goal. You might even call what results intellectual “diversity.”
Although this approach is purposefully broad, we do stand on principles—those of a true liberal arts education. We cite them, for example, when we criticize the college’s history department for failing (for years on end) to offer a single course on the American Founding. We stand on those principles when we object to classroom bullying—for instance, when Keynesian economic professors read our members’ free-market newspaper editorials aloud in class to mock us. We insist on these principles when we demand free speech from a college administration that watches conservative students get jeered into silence in public meetings.
Together we defend free speech, tradition, genuine academic inquiry, and fair play—basic tenets of a free society that, sadly, are not always upheld at America’s elite colleges.
So pool your forces. Gather members. Welcome disputes. Work with outside organizations such as ISI to cosponsor lectures and debates. Don’t let the progressives divide and conquer. As Ben Franklin said, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
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