<p>Just for fun, where do you think the schools that made it into the top twenty slots on US News and World Report's college rankings would rank if you ordered them from most conservative to most liberal? By this, I mean political/economic issues and not social/cultural ones, since every school listed is likely firmly socially liberal (with the exception of maybe Notre Dame). Anyways, here's the list:</p>
<p>Princeton University
Harvard University
Yale University
Columbia University
Stanford University
University of Chicago
Duke University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Pennsylvania
California Institute of Technology
Dartmouth College
Johns Hopkins University
Northwestern University
Brown University
Washington University in St. Louis
Cornell University
Vanderbilt University
Rice University
University of Notre Dame
Emory University
Georgetown University
University of CaliforniaBerkeley</p>
<p>The ISI included MIT on that conservative list because they found that MIT still offered an environment where students are allowed to think for themselves (a crucial value to actual conservatives.). From the web, the ISI considered the following criteria: “the presence or absence of a core curriculum, the nature of student living arrangements, the strength of distribution requirements, the prevalence of ideological bias, the protection of free inquiry, and the state of campus safety.”</p>
<p>The definition of “conservative” is not dependent upon whether one is “gay-friendly.” The implication of your note about MIT is that the campus can’t possibly lean “conservative” if it is friendly, or at least not antagonistic to homosexuals. That reflects a very narrow minded view of “conservatism.” I am both a Constitutional conservative and a Christian and I want people to be free to think for themselves. I would not attempt to use the Constitution to tell people how to live their lives - personally I recommend the Bible for that - and I expect the Constitution to be used to keep the government out of all of our lives as much as possible.</p>
<p>But back to the point of the OPs post . . . I hope that every campus is open to all ideas and not afraid to allow people to speak their minds. Stanford is in a very liberal county and state yet also is the home of one of my favorites, Thomas Sowell. I don’t mind dealing with people with differing perspectives. I just have no patience for fascists. So a list of most fascist and least fascist college campuses would be of great interest to me.</p>
<p>^ I agree, an ISI green light does not necessarily indicate a college is politically right-leaning. The following colleges, for example, all get green lights:</p>
<p>Colorado College
Haverford
Michigan
Princeton
Reed
St. John’s College
UC Santa Barbara</p>
<p>What does the “state of campus safety” have to do with conservative versus liberal? Campus safety is more tied to the campus location than anything else…</p>
<p>They give a green light to super-religious schools like Liberty and Christendom that may not be very good fits for someone who is less religious or of a different religion.</p>
<p>Their reviews of what they call “train wreck” schools also show disdain about LGBTQ friendly policies.</p>
<p>what could any of this possibly mean? how does one assess a college’s politics? what is meant by a liberal or conservative institution?</p>
<p>get a little media coverage for some loud-mouthed student, professor, or administrator and all of a sudden that person, if he or she has someone to prop her or him up, becomes representative of the politics of an institution. please. </p>
<p>besides, what has any of this to do with the quality of education a particular child is going to receive there? Nothing. Must have been a slow news day.</p>
<p>This simply isn’t true there are lots of elite schools that a conservative can thrive at. Washington & Lee is predominately conservative. Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, Boston College, Lehigh, and Wake Forest lean right. Also, schools like Colgate, Holy Cross, Richmond, Bucknell, University of Virginia, and Trinity tend to be pretty moderate. Even schools like Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Rice, Claremont McKenna, Georgetown, MIT, and Williams although liberal will be tolerant and have conservative factions.</p>
<p>The only elite schools that conservatives should avoid are Columbia and Brown which don’t tolerate diversity of thought.</p>
<p>These posts are too funny. Each side blames the other for not accepting diversity when the fact is that each side really doesn’t accept the other side. I am surprised that the conservative list doesn’t start with Oral Roberts or Liberty University, or the the liberal list start with Smith. Regardless, it is very sad to think that people would choose their schools based on politics and not the quality of education they would receive.</p>
<p>timetodecide12, are/were you a Columbia/Brown student? If you’ve never attended school at either institutions I would stay away from labeling them as such based on hearsay.</p>