Conservative Group Building Presence on U.S. Campuses
by Jim Brown
September 15, 2004
(AgapePress) - A conservative group plans to open 200 new chapters this fall on college campuses.The Campus Leadership Program wants to double the number of its affiliates across the U.S. by the end of November. Executive director Dan Flynn says the hope is that those groups will be bringing in more speakers, starting college newspapers, holding rallies, and challenging their administrations and faculty, confronting liberal bias as necessary.
Flynn, author of the book Why the Left Hates America (Prima Lifestyles, 2002), believes there is room for more conservative activism at America's colleges and universities. He observes, "There's a void on a lot of college campuses, where liberal ideas are professed from classroom pulpits. Students get them from textbooks, and they get them from guest lecture programs. If they're not going to get conservative ideas from their fellow students, they're probably not going to get them from anywhere on the college campus."
Flynn and the CLP feel establishing activist bases on school campuses is the necessary remedy to American academia's current dearth of conservative input. "So we feel it's important to start these student groups," he says, "because those students are the vanguard of conservative ideas on college campuses."
The CLP's executive director believes the academic freedom of conservative college students is under assault all across the U.S. and contends that his own personal experiences prove this is so. He recalls several examples, and notes, "I've been shouted down, my writings were subject to a book burning at Berkeley several years ago, and I've been threatened with arrest for speaking at Michigan State a couple years back."
As a result of such constraints, Flynn says he feels his freedom to speak out on college campuses as a conservative "has been curtailed by people within power: administrators, faculty, and others." That is why, he asserts, "it's important that conservatives get out there and get their message out -- to stand up to people who are, in essence, bullies."
The CLP currently has 216 conservative student groups on campuses in 42 states. The conservative group hopes to have at least twice as many chapters in place at U.S. colleges and universities by November 30.
