<p>Just how liberal is the student body at emory? One kid I know made it sound like theres a lotta hippies and overly liberal kids going there.</p>
<p>According to Facebook network stats:</p>
<p>51% None Listed
20% Liberal
12% Moderate
5% Conservative
5% Very Liberal
3% Other
2% Libertarian
2% Apathetic</p>
<p>IMO, these statistics don't lie. Emory's student body is largely liberal. However, there is relatively little campus activism. Generally I think students at Emory are too concerned with their education and future employment prospects to get caught up in the frenzy of politics. It's not anything like Yale (and many other universities across the country) in the 1960s when liberal students were burning books and campus activism was at a high.</p>
<p>How does emory compare to other colleges in terms of liberalism? I mean is it so liberal that the kids are hippies? I'm talking about supremely liberal kids with the scraggly beards and the hippie mentality.</p>
<p>emory is heavily liberal but i don't think you will see many (if any) "hippies." there just are not that many people like you describe on campus even though there are mostly liberal people.</p>
<p>eh, i dunno about that. most people i know are conservatives or moderates (it's still a predominantly southern school despite the long island influx). some students call themselves liberal but are really more libertarian in their ideologies. it also depends on your definition of liberal: political affiliation, economic, social or lifestyle? the answer is drastically different for each one. as far as lifestyle goes, emory is in the middle. it's not a party school but there is a lot of drug use. politically i'd say, of the interested students, the democrats outnumber the republicans about 10 to 1 (maybe more). economically, the wealthy student body is obviously very fiscally conservative. i'd say emory is a little less liberal with respect to social issues than most colleges but it leans left nonetheless. overall i don't think emory should be called a liberal university. the typical "liberal school" is usually far more liberal in all of the preceding categories than emory.</p>
<p>you're experience is pretty atypical. the campus is vastly liberal in almost all of the areas you described. for example, in my military ethics class this past semester we took part of class to express our own views of the current iraq war. the class was unaminously against the war. this is just one example but i think it applies to the larger feeling of the population. i also don't think the school is southern at all. even if a percentage of the population is from the south, the people are not really "southern" just like atlanta is not a southern city.</p>
<p>This thread seems to be turning into a tricky debate over what it means to be "liberal." </p>
<p>Whatever "liberal" may mean, the fact remains that Emory students overwhelmingly identify themselves as "liberal". (see stats in post #1)</p>
<p>To me, their identification as "liberal" more or less suggests they identify themselves as Democrats, and they generally support the Democratic platform.</p>
<p>But as I said earlier, I think that Emory students are relatively a-political; there is little campus activism. They're interested in getting a good education and high-paying job, not starting a revolution, like many liberal students in the 1960s were. (See: Kent State riots) While they do not revolt, they share certain beliefs with those liberal students in the 1960s who revolted and wanted to "stick it to the man". Some of these beliefs include: secularism, pacifism, and radical individualism. Yet, they also differ in some beliefs; the student body seems to be less skeptical about American government and fully embraces free-market capitalism, for example.</p>
<p>I always found it interesting how the very small protests of the Iraq war on campus were performed by older people of a different generation, men with grey pony-tails wearing sandals. I did not see many, if any, Emory students actually protest.</p>
<p>While Emory does draw mostly southern students, we should not forget that many of these "southern" students do not fit the stereotypes of the souterner. In general, the elitely educated class tends to be liberal and the southern students at Emory are apart of the elitely educated class. Moreover, they come from cities that are geographically southern but are not culturally southern. Ex: Atlanta, Miami, Orlando</p>