Yeah. I’d have to agree with this post. Wofford is a fairly conservative school, while Furman is fairly liberal. (Perhaps it isn’t as liberal as other schools across the nation, but it stands in stark contrast to many other schools in South Carolina.) Neither are religious schools.
Bob Jones is “conservative”, but I wouldn’t recommend it to an average conservative or Republican who is looking for a welcoming environment. I consider myself to be very conservative and BJU is too much.
I think it’s also good to look at Moderate schools… schools that don’t lean heavily either way. I consider USC (South Carolina) to be a fairly moderate school. It’s 50% in-state and 50% out-of-state. Most oos kids are liberal and most in-state kids are conservative. You have some that waver to the other side both in-state and out-of-state, but it ends up creating a pretty balanced environment. Our paper is definitely left-leaning, which is surprising for a southern state school a block from the State Capitol that still has the Confederate Flag waving.
I think people are mistaken with Stanford. It’s liberal, but on its school grounds stands the very conservative think tank, the Hoover Institute, which is not officially associated with Stanford.
I would also not put Pt. Loma Nazarene on the list. Some students are conservative but it’s actually politically liberal.
I agree with:
Hillsdale
Grove City College
Biola
Univ. of Dallas
Patrick Henry
I’d add:
Cedarville
Belmont Abbey
Baylor (at least the student body)
Schools where conservatives will feel accepted easily, though they aren’t conservative schools:
Also, many people are posting some elite universities because they “seem” conservative. I highly, highly doubt that a majority Princeton or CMC students are socially conservative, simply because the most intelligent people tend to be more open-minded. Fiscally conservative? Sure; most of these students are probably filthy rich. But as was stated in the original post, this thread is for socially conservative campuses.
Conservative Catholics would call Jesuit schools “liberal.”
The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College lists Catholic schools that would be considered “conservative.”
Many of them have already been mentioned: Thomas Aquinas College (CA), University of Dallas, Franciscan U.(Steubenville), Ave Maria (FL), Belmont Abbey (NC), etc.
Benedictine College (KS), Wyoming Catholic, U. of St. Thomas (Houston) are a few others.
Catholic U. of America, where the religion and philosophy depts. are orthodox, is included in the Newman Guide, but most of the undergrads there are probably not that conservative.
I would guess that conservative students would feel comfortable at many large state universities in the midwest and south–and especially those schools that are career/engineering/ag.-oriented because those students tend to care more about getting jobs and aren’t so interested in politics. Schools like Purdue, Missouri S&T (formerly U. MO-Rolla) or K-State come to mind. Just about any school in Texas or OK would have a large percentage of conservatives.
Wabash College is a good example of a conservative college. The students are generally a bit more conservative than the professors, but it is not known for conservatives that decry bias. With its classic liberal-art curriculum it stresses the classics and encourages debate. Plenty of Midwestern politicians are graduates, with Republicans an overwhelming majority. Religion, Classics, Rhetoric are popular classes.
My son is a very liberal Democrat who is also thriving there, and values debating with his classmates. Socially it is a pretty wet campus and the school follows only one rule: to be a gentleman.
DePauw in Indiana is also a moderate to conservative institution.
It’s difficult for a college to lean conservative. The liberal arts are fiercely leftist, the sciences are fiercely leftist, mathematics and engineering are fairly leftist…
It’s all an evil Liberal Science Secular Intellectual Conspiracy!