Conservative Princeton Students Want Minority Viewpoint Welcomed on Campus

by Jim Brown
April 8, 2004

(AgapePress) - A conservative student at Princeton University is fighting political and ideological bias on the Ivy League campus. Junior Evan Baehr has started the Princeton University chapter of Students for Academic Freedom, a national group founded by Republican activist David Horowitz.

Baehr says he and fellow conservatives on campus realized that dialogue in humanities classes like philosophy and ethics was being shaped by graduate students leading small group discussions, and by professors in lectures, resulting in some very one-sided conversations.

The small contingent of conservatives started to think about how minority viewpoints might be brought to the table. "And by minority," Baehr explains, "I would mean any viewpoint that's sort of not a popular one or not one that is sort of widely agreed upon on campus. And generally the state of the university today is -- especially among the professors -- a fairly liberal population."

The Princeton chapter of Students for Academic Freedom recently conducted a study on the political affiliation of the university's professors. According to Baehr, in some departments they found the ratio was 30-to-1 on the Democrat side. In view of that disparity, the conservative student says he would like to see the school adopt an "intellectual affirmative action policy."

Baehr's group would like to see liberal professors and others be more welcoming of conservative ideas in classroom discussion. He notes that with the present climate on the campus, there is little chance of fostering truly open intellectual exchange.

Baehr says he and others at the university have come to recognize that, "if you have students that hold certain viewpoints that might bring a conservative or nominally Christian perspective to the table and that no one else is willing to defend -- perhaps, for example, being uncomfortable with gay marriage, or perhaps being pro-life -- then the students feel intimidated, and they don't feel welcome to share their beliefs at the table."

But the leader of Students for Academic Freedom says his group is not looking to threaten professors or come across as a watchdog agency. Rather, it wants to sponsor and encourage wide-scale discussion on how to include minority views in the classroom.

Baehr has plans to meet with every Princeton professor to discuss ways to promote academic freedom at the school.