<p>"Cornell has Agriculture majors, hotel school students, etc. and those students tend to be more conservative. "</p>
<p>I don’t know whether Cornell ag school students, as a group, are more conservative than the campus as a whole, or not. The real “4H club” contingent from upstate is possibly, on the whole, more conservative. But the ag school houses the department of natural resources, and all the “environmental” type programs. What is the typical political predispostion of a botanist? I’ve no idea. The school produces lots of future biology PhDs.</p>
<p>While I was paying attention, the engineers wee a more conservative contingent there. During a big campus demonstration in the Vietnam era the engineers staged a counter-demonstration. They just wanted to study for finals.</p>
<p>Bay, in rereading my response to you, I am wondering whether it came off as flippant. That certainly was not the intention, as I seriously do not know what defines the “crunchy, granola type.” My son has the dress and manner of a young conservative, but the opinions of a Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, or Howard Zinn. So I do not really know whether he would fit under the definition. I do know that he prefers not to go to school someplace where he will be outnumbered more than three to one when he gets into political arguments.</p>
<p>austinareadad,
I do not have an answer for you then. I don’t know of any particular colleges that lean toward “liberal non-capitalistic, non-corporate types who look like stereotypical corporate types.” In general, I think nearly all colleges (except for the very religious ones) are more liberal than the US population at-large, so your son will probably be comfortable at most of them. I agree with Hunt (even if he was just being humorous) that your son may find more like-minded students among students who dress like the crunchy granola crowd, (variously defined here: [Urban</a> Dictionary: granola](<a href=“http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=granola]Urban”>Urban Dictionary: Granola))</p>
<p>Adding: I looked up the backgrounds of Chomsky, Zinn and Nader, and they attended NYU/CU; UPenn; and Princeton/Harvard, respectively. So maybe those schools would be good choices for your son.</p>
<p>Bay, I appreciated your response. Chomsky, Zinn, and Nader did graduate from excellent institutions, but that was a long time ago, in a political environment far different from the one of today. I still am somewhat in the dark about the political leanings, on economic matters, of the majority of the current students at those institutions.</p>
<p>In answer to the point that you and Hunt both raised about the potential problems of acceptance by other left-leaning students, the only difficulty I see for a left-leaning student dressing conservatively is in purchasing or otherwise obtaining appropriate clothing in a manner that does not serve the interests of predatory entities, and I think there are ways to do that. I believe that left-leaning students generally are quite open-minded and accepting of others’ dress, particularly those with whom they agree on the issues most important to them.</p>
<p>There was a kid in my son’s high school class who always dressed up–often wore a jacket and tie to school, at least a sweater, collared shirt and slacks, etc. I was astounded to learn that he wasn’t a young Republican–actually, he was quite liberal. That’s OK–but people do tend to categorize young people by how they dress.</p>
<p>William & Mary? Darn, that is a state school and OOS for a public for undergrad doesn’t make much sense. I was hoping you would say “U of Chicago” or some other such school that we are curious about (my son just received a letter from U of C yesterday which piqued his interest).</p>
<p>I also know a couple of quirky kids who went to Chicago–it might be a good choice. Don’t write off William and Mary so quickly–it’s a bit different from your typical state school.</p>
<p>Duke is actually in an area (Triangle/Durham) that is OVERWHELMINGLY liberal. North Carolina is generally conservative, though, but did vote for Obama in the last presidential election. But I’d agree that Duke’s not southern and is liberal, much like most other elite institutions in this country. </p>
<p>I think the differences are exaggerated and based on stereotypes and preconceived notions more than reality. Perhaps public schools that get a large majority of their students from a single state might be more concentrated in a certain philosophy and those points are valid, but schools that admit students more broadly are closer than we’d think. I think a conservative or liberal person would be perfectly fine and be able to meet plenty of people with similar worldviews at Brown or Dartmouth, despite people saying Brown is ridiculously liberal and Dartmouth is the conservative Ivy. Historically, those depictions are probably rooted in reality, but I’d say they have considerably dwindled in the past decade or so and the difference between Brown and Dartmouth is not that stark.</p>
<p>Hunt, I know that William and Mary is a wonderful university, but we have a quite decent flagship state university, UT-Austin, which is actually commuting distance from our house (not saying that my son would choose to commute), and which has some very good honors programs. So while I agree that OOS publics like William and Mary (or UC-Berkeley) can make sense for many people, I do not believe they would make much sense for my son with his situation.</p>
<p>And I had read that about U of Chicago and its many quirky students. It may be worth a visit at some point.</p>
<p>Here’s my admittedly subjective take, based in part (no doubt) on lingering stereotypes but also anecdotes and first-hand impressions gathered over years of interactions with faculty, students, alums, and in many cases the institutions and communities themselves:</p>
<p>Almost all mildly to moderately left-of-center, and as bluedog suggested in post #31^, not that much of a spread. But I do think there are some subtle shadings.</p>
<p>Chicago is an interesting case in point. Many people think it’s a conservative school, based largely on the conservative—and stellar—reputation of its economics faculty, as well as some famous law-and-economics scholars at its law school. And some conservative students are drawn there to study economics and/or law. But they’re a drop in the bucket of the university’s overall student body, who otherwise are pretty much indistinguishable from those you’d find at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Columbia. In Chicago, the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, dominated by U of C faculty, staff, and students, is known as the most overwhelmingly and reliably liberal-voting and politically active section of the city, launching the careers of such liberal stalwarts as former U.S. Senator Paul Douglas; longtime Alderman, civil rights champion, and anti-machine crusader Leon Despres; former U.S. Rep. and D.C. Circuit Judge Abner Mikva; former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington; and of course President Barack Obama. Not to mention the Rev. Jesse Jackson, if you want to throw the nearby Kenwood neighborhood into the mix. And I don’t see any evidence that the U of C students as a whole are significantly to the right of the neighborhood median.</p>
<p>bclintonk, thanks for the input. Though I understand that an Obama voter would feel comfortable at any of these institutions, including the University of Chicago, I just hope that a Nader voter would feel just as comfortable.</p>
<p>This scale is totally insufficient. Ayn Rand was a radical atheist, yet the most fundamentalist Christians are considered conservative. Ayn Rand was a strong supporter of immigration, yet the strongest opponents of immigration are considered conservative. </p>
<p>Karl Marx, unlike modern liberals, was not very supportive of the lower classes (which he called the lumpenproleteriat) because he believed that they did not have revolutionary potential. His favorite class was the working middle class, which actually fits better with the demographics of modern conservatism.</p>
<p>Might not be the best example–IMO, Nader jumped the shark before most of us became aware of politics. But his actual positions are not so uncommon on campus.</p>
<p>Very good point. Nader’s positions on issues are well within the mainstream on major college campuses. Where some would differ with him is on tactics, namely whether it’s best to try to build a third party (Nader’s view) or instead it’s better to elect Ds on the grounds that their views are generally more progressive than Rs. I don’t think there’s unanimity on that question on many campuses. Indeed, I suspect the campuses we’ve been discussing here are, relative to the population at large, hotbeds of Nader strength, though the Naderites are a minority even there. Which perhaps says something about the likelihood of Nader’s strategy succeeding, but we don’t need to go there.</p>
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<p>Of course. Not many liberals define themselves by how close they are to Marx, nor do many conservatives define themselves by how close they are to Ayn Rand. Indeed, most American liberals would find many of Marx’s views pretty repulsive, and the views of those who have claimed to be Marxists even worse. And Rand’s views would be equally repulsive to many American conservatives, except that the name and the views are less well known. Beyond that, there’s actually a great diversity of views on both sides of the political aisle. I suspect the OP just chose those Marx and Rand to symbolize extreme positions on the left and right, not to suggest we gauge actual adherence to their particular views.</p>
<p>Good points about Nader. I was really trying to get at the support for his positions on the issues, rather than for the man himself. I considered just using the Green Party instead of Nader, but Nader seemed a better fit for my purposes because of his lack of emphasis on the social-cultural issues.</p>
<p>As for the scale from Ayn Rand to Marx, if you read the first post, you would see that the deviation from orthodox definitions of liberalism was completely intentional, and the Rand to Marx scale was appropriate for my purposes. The desire was to find some information on where the kids stand on the political-economic issues, rather than on the social-cultural issues. Every discussion I have seen on CC regarding the liberal v. conservative debate has been more about social-cultural positions than political-economic positions, and so I did not find them helpful. My kid does not have strong opinions on the social-cultural issues (he is an atheist but can get along well with culturally conservative Christian kids), but does on the political-economic issues, and to gauge compatibility I was trying to focus on those issues, and ignoring the social-cultural issues. Besides, as I stated earlier, I already knew (I believe it is common knowledge) that the great majority of kids at the elite universities were liberal on the social-cultural issues.</p>
<p>As for Marx’s support for the lumpenproletariat, I prefer not to discuss such issues at length at a forum like this, as there are plenty of other sites for such discussions. Marxism generally represents economic egalitarianism, and Randian thought is generally at the opposite extreme with regard to economic matters, and that is why they were used.</p>