---

BY MENGHAN JIN

In print | Published October 21, 2010

To say that conservative students at Swarthmore do not feel isolated from the rest of the predominantly liberal student body may seem contradictory. But for conservative David Hill ’13, life at Swarthmore is not so bad.

“I really like this place. … I’ve had actually a lot of really good engagements with people,” he said. “But sometimes when I get bored, I put on a conservative t-shirt … and go debating.”

In fact, though conservatives at Swarthmore are considered part of a minority group, most students who identify with this political orientation do not feel ostracized from their peers and are generally content with both their academic and social experience at the college thus far.

Ashley Vogel ’13 is another student who says her views align closer to the right end of the political spectrum. “I’m generally happy,” she said. “For the most part, the professors that I’ve encountered have been very supportive. They try to be as open-minded as possible and not just represent one side.”

This discrepancy between perception and reality is highlighted by Assistant Professor of Political Science Ben Berger. He has also come to find that, while in theory, it seems logical to think that conservative students are being ostracized in the Swarthmore community, in most of his classes, that is not an issue. “In classroom settings, it’s really not clear to me that students would ostracize somebody,” he said. “Certainly not in the classrooms, they wouldn’t do it.”

The missing presence of the College Republicans on campus may account for the erroneous perception. Since the coordinator of the group, Jacqueline Bailey-Ross ’12, is currently studying abroad in Russia, the group has disbanded until further notice.

According to Natalie Litton ’12, president of the College Democrats, this lack of an organized group of conservatives may give the student body a false sense of the number of conservative students on campus. “I think there are more conservatives than we may think,” she said.

Data on the proportion of conservative students at Swarthmore is not available, but a study carried out by The Phoenix earlier this week found that out of 92 randomly selected students, 70.7 percent identified themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal” and only 9.9 percent as “conservative” or “very conservative,” while the rest identified as “middle of the road.”

But this trend is not unique to Swarthmore. Historically, the world of academia has been home to a wealth of liberal ideas and individuals and a much smaller conservative representation. Generally, liberal arts schools have been known to attract more left-leaning students.

“Institutions often replicate themselves,” Berger said. “There may be an unconscious way in which students are attracted to liberal arts colleges because they get the sense that the faculty there is on the left and that’s what they want.”

So why would conservative students such as Hill and Vogel come to Swarthmore knowing that they would be in the political minority?

“People here are smart,” Hill said. “Back home, we have people that are liberal, but not necessarily educated about it, just as you often have ill-educated conservatives – people who just hold a viewpoint because they can hold it, not because they can defend it.”

Embracing the fact that he’d be in the political minority, Hill came to Swarthmore in hopes of adding diversity to the left-leaning campus. He even discovered that admissions accepted him to the Class of 2013 in part for “diversity purposes.”

While college faculty has been found to be fairly liberal across most campuses, the high caliber of the Swarthmore faculty may justify the overall contentment of conservative students.

Associate Professor of Sociology Sarah S. Willie-LeBreton attributes this trend to Swarthmore’s outstanding reputation as a rigorous and highly selective school. “[This] would more than compensate for any anxiety that potential students had about it being a hotbed of liberalism,” she said. According to Willie-LeBreton, conservative students who come into Swarthmore acknowledge the disproportionate number of students who identify as liberal, yet have faith in knowing that they will get a superior education and not be penalized for their beliefs in and out of class.

This rationale rings true for Josh Satre ’13, who chose Swarthmore precisely because he knew he’d be able to engage with fellow students who shared different views. A potential political science major, Satre greatly enjoys bringing right wing perspectives to often one-sided discussions in class. “In my opinion, that’s what Swarthmore is all about — having your opinions and being willing to back them up,” he said.

The small 8:1 faculty-student ratio at Swarthmore may also play a major role in attracting certain conservative students. At larger institutions, faculty may have less interaction with students; at small liberal arts colleges, faculty members, though most do identify as liberal, try to invest first and foremost in their relationship with students.

“There’s a premium placed on collegiality, on fairness and … no matter what our political beliefs are, on genuinely showing all of our students that one, they won’t be graded on their politics and two, that we see it as part of our obligation to have positive relationships with students,” Willie-LeBreton said.

Most faculty members in the political science department agree that their role, especially in such a unique community as Swarthmore, is not to impose their political views on students, but rather to encourage intelligent debate in the classroom regarding all aspects of American and international politics.

“Faculty both tolerate and encourage other kinds of views to be aired on campus and to be discussed in classes — really free intellectual inquiry that’s broad-ranging. I’ve never gotten the sense that it’s been stultified or … that kind of free inquiry is capped at Swarthmore,” Berger said.

Hill, a possible political science major, often finds himself playing devil’s advocate in class, but has nevertheless benefitted from expressing his opinions. “Having that other viewpoint, professors seem to like it,” he said. “I’ve had them thank me for being the other point of view.”

Professor of Political Science Richard Valelly has found the presence of conservative students in class, however minuscule, to be enjoyable. “I found that anytime I have smart conservatives, they feel, ‘Hey, this is my time to shine,’” he said.

However, Litton, who chose Swarthmore specifically because she admired the unabashed nature of the community in its political views, found the opposite to be true — that conservative students do not speak up as often in class.

“I’ve heard that conservatives certainly feel as if they are outnumbered, which is true, but that they also feel like people aren’t interested in what they have to say or there’s an assumption that everybody is on the same ideological end of the spectrum and that everybody agrees,” she said.

Many of what contributes to this hesitation in speaking up, Litton believes, is an assumption among liberal students that everyone is on the same page, which then leads to the prevalence of one-sided conversations.

Vogel, though content, remains disappointed by the one-sidedness of discussions within her peers. “My hope . . . was that I would be able to meet all these people with all these different kinds of political backgrounds and of different political views. There isn’t so much the variety; it’s kind of one-sided,” she said. “If I try to bring an alternate viewpoint in . . . people will just dismiss you. It’s actually a lot more hostile an environment than I had imagined from the beginning.”

Apart from a couple frustrations, Swarthmore for Hill, Satre and Vogel is not as unbearable as it may seem. When asked whether he was nervous about the prevalence of liberals at Swarthmore, Satre replied, “I relish a challenge.”

---

« RETURN TO NEWS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »