<p>Lol. whoever said michigan is conservative is… wrong. It’s one of the most liberal schools in the country historically. Not Brown liberal, but AA liberal.</p>
<p>I attended Hillsdale College, and absolutely loved it (I still go back there to attend some of the CCA lecture series). I also have a pretty broad view of schools, having attended a Tier 1, very leftist public university, and have taken a course or two at University of Michigan. The classes at Hillsdale were much smaller and in fact more rigorous and encouraging of debate than at U of M. Just one student’s opinion, of course. Michigan excels at research and science and post-grad, Hillsdale is probably a better literature/American civics/classics school. Forbes now has them about tied (U of M 92, Hillsdale 106), as they tend to favor smaller schools than US News or Princeton Review.</p>
<p>if you are not liberal at 20, you have no heart. if you are not conservative at 40, you have no brain. </p>
<p>xD</p>
<p>Dartmouth seems more moderate than the other Ivies.</p>
<p>Nervous-</p>
<p>Sooooo- You think Sarah Palin/Sharon Angel/Christine O Donnel must be a genius??? Thats a trite phrase that obviously isnt true.</p>
<p>Lol @ nervous.</p>
<p>Nervous has it right. Most people at 20 are young and idealistic, but once they get older and start living in the real world the realize how bogus some of the far-left ideas really are.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>lol no. Actually, the student body is pretty similar throughout every top 15 college. There might be a little/subtle difference (More hackers at MIT, more athletic students at Duke, more rich students at Harvard, etc, but they’re collectively the same.)
My personal list of top 15 (I only have 13 listed though…)</p>
<p>MIT
Stanford, Princeton
Harvard, Yale
UPenn, Columbia, Duke
Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and UChicago
Caltech :D</p>
<p>@tisthetruth – No, it isn’t. The truth, I mean. ;)</p>
<p>Yea!!! Lets celebrate being an old fart!! </p>
<p>Dont confuse cynicism with knowledge. Jesus, Jefferson, and MLK were in their 30s when they changed the world with some pretty liberal ideas.</p>
<p>I’m fairly annoyed at people my age (hs seniors/college age) who say they’re liberal without knowing about it. They just like Obama because he’s ‘cool’ and because most young people identify as liberal they view conservatives as stuffy old people. Personally, i’m right of center because I see that what the Democrats are doing now is just passing on the financial burdens to our generation, and no one my age seems to give a crap. So they can be faux-liberals all they want as long as they stick to the trends and don’t go to the polls on election day.</p>
<p>and CMC is conservative</p>
<p>Boston College is pretty conservative</p>
<p>I find that hard to believe. </p>
<p>Most universities in general are left leaning, I myself am far far left leaning. </p>
<p>However, there have been very few instances where the professors Ive met haven’t appreciated being challenged, as long as the person doing to challenging can construct
well thought out, logical argument, and then back it up.</p>
<p>Student body in most top 15 universities are the same. If I were the Beyonder and magically switched the students from Yale to Dartmouth without them realizing, they would all still be the same. </p>
<p>People are people. They’re only influenced by the traditions of a university. Some traditions are conservative, some liberal.</p>
<p>I’m going to Duke, my program is actually superior to that of the Ivy’s and I’m extreme right. Liberals hire liberals. There are some brilliant conservatives who graduate from liberal universities but usually don’t teach at those universities. Could they be hired? This is simply ideological monopoly. Besides this, how many great conservative minds have graduated from Harvard, Yale, Duke, ect. entered business, politics, and medicine? It seems that conservatives trend toward fields other than academia. Thus the University leadership and professorships are left to the liberals.</p>
<p>I actually asked the tour guide at Swarthmore: “If everyone is so liberal, who do you argue with?”. She said that there were different degrees of liberalism. </p>
<p>There is no middle of the road at Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Just so we’re on the same page here, I thought I’d try to lend a bit of clarification (via obfuscation maybe. We’ll see. Hehe):</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Classical Liberalism is not synonymous with how most of us in the Western world treat the term “Liberal” today.</p></li>
<li><p>Most US conservatives and liberals dance around the idea (and ideals) of libertarianism. The main differences tend to be that conservatives tend to favor liberty on the economic side but not as much on the social side, while liberals tend to espouse liberty on the social side but not so much on the economic side.</p></li>
<li><p>Professors and students at most schools – not just the top schools – do seem to lean farther left than those not in academia. Students, because they are young and passionate; profs, because there is that all-providing “bubble” that others have mentioned. Conservatives tend to make their professional mark, rather, in business and banking – things in line with what they care about, economic liberty. </p></li>
<li><p>As long as profs and students really are tolerant of other views and (thus) invite real debate, there’s no reason for any conservative students to feel seriously apprehensive about attending those top, great schools. It would be a shame if the “uberliberal” reputation of many of the schools kept the brightest conservative kids from attending.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>“I actually asked the tour guide at Swarthmore: “If everyone is so liberal, who do you argue with?”. She said that there were different degrees of liberalism.”</p>
<p>There are, but I found this kind of debate pretty frustrating when I was at Swarthmore’s neighbor Bryn Mawr. I ended up on the right end of arguments because I was a pretty mainstream Democrat.</p>
<p>I didn’t think it made any difference in the vast majority of my classes (language, math, psychology, theater, English, science, etc.). But for classes that touched on history, economics, and politics, it was a down side.</p>