Is Princeton a conservative or liberal school? And what about other Ivies?

<p>I guess getting a whole page without devolving into a political argument was a pretty good run.</p>

<p>Who’s Russ Limbaugh?</p>

<p>I can see that you don’t like the “language of hatred” toughyear:</p>

<p>“”"
I don’t like glen beck, russ limbaugh, sarah palin, and most tea party protesters. in fact, i hate them. these morons put the people on the other side of politics and put them under cross hairs. what if russ limbaugh or sarah palin were under cross hairs and one left wing lunatic shot them ?? i just hate these people’s languages of hatred. it is like poison that spoils the weakling’s mind and push them over the threshold. i see more right wing lunatics than the opposite who are much more likely to commit random violent acts. sarah palin should be politically buried for the arizona incident.
“”"</p>

<p>^^ LOL</p>

<p>“I hate those people who hate!”</p>

<p>I’m fiercely liberal in the sense of socially liberal - I should have explained that - but more so, I am “fiercely” liberal in that I am vocal about my beliefs and fights for them. That said, I am also a 17 year old teen girl who understands the difficulty of peer pressure and who doesn’t want to be a social outcast. </p>

<p>I was raised by two dads who adopted me from a 3rd world country and any way you slice it, I would be tremendously offended to be in a place where the majority of people believe my parents are dirty and disguisting and don’t deserve rights. I don’t expect everyone to share my beliefs, I’ve been dealing with people cursing my parents and cursing my ethnicity for my entire life, but I am certainly not going to pay upwards of 50 grand a year to be surrounded by that hatred. </p>

<p>I don’t want to go into International Relations to fight over political affiliations, I want to go into IR to help my home country and others like it recover. I heard that WW is an excellent school for IR and I have thoroughly researched the academic programs and study abroad opportunities and believe it would be a great fit for me.</p>

<p>That said, I am also considering Yale’s program. Though my concern there is that they are remodeling the program and I am not certain I want to be there during the transition period.</p>

<p>I do not believe you have to worry about Princeton. While it’s not quite as liberal as Yale, it’s a place full of intellectuals. Intellectuals are liberal, far more often than conservative. They don’t tend to create such good sound bytes though.</p>

<p>If you’ve taken AP Government, they treat it as a confirmed fact that college tends to sway students toward liberalism. You’ll be fine. Besides, unless your entire personality revolves around liberalism, you will be fine. People are accepting. Plus, particularly at highly intellectual universities, people love a good debate. Good luck getting in.</p>

<p>It seems like Princeton has all kind of people.</p>

<p>Although most students probably have liberal leanings, there are plenty of conservatives as well.</p>

<p>brown is a very liberal schoool and they have a lot of international relations majors, although im not sure about their programs</p>

<p>I wasn’t aware that being socially conservative meant automatically that one would “believe my parents are dirty and disguisting and don’t deserve rights.”</p>

<p>Because yup I definitely see pure hatred seeping out of every pore of Princeton’s “conservative” campus all the time. Conservatives are really just devils incarnate that will take every opportunity to openly and actively seek out people who are different, without even knowing them, and then vaguely and stereotypically label them as people worthy of indiscriminate hating.</p>

<p>Oh wait.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Thank you for posting exactly what I was just going to say :D. I am fascinated and greatly intrigued by your incredibly interesting background – if I were to meet you in college, I would love to learn more about it. Coming from the right, however, the thought that your parents “don’t deserve rights” would never, ever cross my mind. I one-hundred percent respect that and your background. Coming from my experiences, there tends to be a harshly misguided impression of what it means to be right-of-center (especially as it relates to the “I hate those who hate” post).</p>

<p>^ That post was at OP, not at people on the right.</p>

<p>I’m fiercely liberal, go to Princeton, and have no trouble. Some of my friends share my views, some don’t, but it’s no big deal.</p>

<p>“newest newb” and “jeffc418” are correct. Whether Princeton is liberal or conservative, you will not last there with that one-dimensional thinking your statement presented; indeed, hatred of other races, which you claim victim to, is never limited to one party or another (as much as I “hate those who hate,” as another person so elegantly posted). In fact, because liberals often fail to win people over with their ideas and merits alone, they pretty much just resort to duping those same people into thinking that conservatives are racist (it worked for getting Mr. Obama into office, now let’s see if it can keep him there). I’m sorry, but it seems they got you hook, line, and sinker.</p>

<p>Conservatives are certainly not, a priori, racist. They are, however, generally less intellectual and academically high-achieving than liberals (hence the vanishingly low percentage of conservatives on the faculty of top tier colleges and universities, among research scientists, etc.). The conservative mentality, pretty much by definition, tends not to “think outside of the box”. That said, it is parochial to fall strictly along party lines without thinking issues through- both conservatives and liberals can be wrong (even a stopped clock is right twice a day).</p>

<p>I’m actually slightly taken aback that you worry about this, lilyjames.
Even among the conservatives, nobody’s going to call your family an abomination or employ some other deplorable and nonsensical slur. I imagine that Princeton students, in order to have been admitted, must have exhibited some quality of maturity, tolerance and intelligence.
They’ll have at least one liberal on campus this fall anyway. :P</p>

<p>If you go to ANY college where academic credentials and intellectualism are paramount values, very few people are going to be “fiercely” attached to a particular party or prepackaged set of ideas. While almost everyone who cares about politics has a predilection one way or the other, most people are idiosyncratic in their positions to a large extent, and interested in vigorous (and rigorous) debate as a way of refining their views. so a place like Princeton is always going to be seen as deeply unsatisfactory to ideologues of any stripe, and ideologues, in turn, will have a hard time fitting in and getting respect at Princeton.</p>

<p>From the standpoint of, say, Southern or Southwestern social conservatives, Princeton will seem very liberal, along with almost everywhere else in mainstream, elite academia. On the spectrum of mainstream, elite academia, Princeton is probably a smidge to the right of center (which means a smidge closer to the non-academic-elite political center than most of its peers). But that kind of average positioning is pretty irrelevant to an individual student, because there are lots of people with all sorts of positions all over the political spectrum, and few of them fit comfortably into any sort of cubbyhole.</p>

<p>I can agree with “Dad2” that liberals have a greater presence in higher education (though anyone who looks can see the trend is parallel to the weaker and weaker quality of American universities since the 1960s. Not pretty). However, it would be incorrect to assume that this is because of a general difference in intelligence rather than vocational interest (and for one, I’m confident that the professors of the very conservative-leaning Hillsdale can stand toe-to-toe with the best and brightest at, say, Harvard, Berkeley, or Brown); after all, conservatives, in contrast, have a greater presence in business, so is the country’s economic future best left in their hands?
The point on which I would disagree with “Dad2” is the assumption that conservatives are less prone to “think outside the box,” or rather, be “open-minded,” which is unfortunately a tired word that any discerning voter should be able to instantly shrug off as pointless, emotion-based liberal rhetoric, since one can always find “intellectuals” of that stripe to be just as “intolerant”/“ignorant”/“hateful”/“blah blah blah” towards certain other ideas–such as merit-based scholarship, Roman virtue, natural law, free-market capitalism, and ESPECIALLY religion (or maybe just Christianity, I dunno)–as those they accuse of lacking “open-mindedness” in the first place supposedly are towards ideas with…not as much basis in history.</p>