The College Fix

Word of advice: Stop saying ‘liberty’

WASHINGTON – If conservative students want to make a difference on their left-leaning college campuses, they need to avoid conservative buzzwords and point to the liberty underpinnings in everyday college activities.

It also helps to use wacky props.

At a Heritage Foundation event Thursday co-hosted by the National Review Institute, representatives from conservative campus activism programs offered ideas for how students can better promote freedom and conservatism on campus – even if they can’t do anything right away about riot-prone leftist classmates or biased administrators.

The key to getting college students to listen to conservative ideas is using nuanced language, said Tyler Castle, manager of academic programs and senior associate in the Values & Capitalism initiative at the American Enterprise Institute.

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“At a lot of campuses, ‘liberty’ has almost become a word that people hear and are automatically turned off,” he said. “So instead of that, maybe talk about human dignity or potential. Start there, and then a lot of people will agree with the principles of liberty even if they might not say that they would.”

According to Nate Mills, campus outreach and programs officer at the National Review Institute, talking about guns rights means “you’ve already lost them.” Activists should instead talk about self-defense, which is “not a left or right issue, it’s a question of human dignity,” and thus open to debate.

Start a wide-ranging book club – and invite liberals

Students should be bold activists for issues that their classmates actually care about, said Lauren McCue, program officer of chapter services at Young America’s Foundation.

“Some issues just aren’t pressing on some campuses,” McCue said. “Be really tuned-in to what students are talking about.”

Listening @yaf program officer @LMcCue26 today at a @Heritage panel learning how to promote Freedom on campuses! 👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/hn4TwIfWC1

— BEEF 🥩 (@BeefLowmain) August 4, 2016

For urban campuses, Castle suggested, activists could explain that ridesharing service Uber is “the free market, that’s free enterprise—everyone uses Uber who is between 18 and 25. But talk about things in a way that makes people say, ‘Oh, that affects my life, that makes sense.’”

It can be tempting for students to think the fight for freedom is all about them standing alone, the idea that “‘I know my economics, I know my politics—and it’s me against the system,’” said Chesterton Cobb, regional director of student programs and outreach at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

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But they need to be “part of an intellectual community” to be effective communicators, he said: They should be in conversation “with other people who care about the same ideas, with people who are actually reading those texts.”

Cobb suggested that conservatives invite their peers, on all points of the ideological spectrum, to book discussions that probe the deeper questions of history and philosophy and culture.

Two-thirds of a pizza pays for Medicare

Not all campuses are hotbeds of leftist activism, and one audience member mentioned that many students are more interested in technology and entertainment than activism.

To reach those students, Castle replied, conservative activists should be creative, hosting a debate or another fun activity instead of a lecture.

Watch| @tylergcastle, Manager @AEI @ValuesAndCap talks about competition of ideas. @Heritage https://t.co/EKpPl6M3AQ https://t.co/teKsBJY22R

— AEI for Students (@AEIforStudents) August 4, 2016

“We had one group a couple years ago go on the quad with a bunch of pizzas,” he said without mentioning which campus. “We did something called the budgetary pie. They would open up the pizza box and say ‘OK, how many slices of the pizza do you think goes to Medicare spending?’ And they would say, ‘One piece,’ and you’d be like, ‘No, it’s actually two thirds.’”

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If their campus chapters of Young Americans for Freedom or College Republicans are a great community and a place where people want to hang out, it will be easier to convince their peers to give a listen to conservative values, panelists said.

"You don't want to provoke the Left just to get a riot, you want to boldly promote conservatism in a way that draws people in." @LMcCue26

— YAF (@yaf) August 4, 2016

And activists should emphasize that “‘liberty’ isn’t everything,” Castle said. “It’s necessary for societal and human flourishing, but it’s not going to ensure societal and human flourishing—we need other things as well.”

Freedom is important “because of what we do with that freedom,” Cobb said. “Part of that is to be able to be self-governing—to have a better-ordered soul and society as a whole.”

And on campus, students need freedom to genuinely engage in the conversation – “especially with the Western Tradition and its great philosophy” – that underpins human flourishing and intellectual advancement, Cobb said – to decide what kind of society and culture we want.

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