UNC-Chapel Hill (my alma mater) has a conservative group that is organized, serious, and unstoppable - and they're meeting with Chancellor James Moser today to discuss the undiverse political atmosphere of the campus:
[Conservative] students, who earlier this year formed a group called the Committee for a Better Carolina, have a broader agenda. They say conservative students are uncomfortable and intimidated on a campus that is overwhelmingly liberal, and they want the university to commit to big changes.
First, they will ask Moeser to include political affiliation and ideology in the university's official nondiscrimination policy. They also want the university to devote more money to bring in speakers from a wider variety of ideological perspectives. And they want the university to conduct an investigation into the campus climate for conservatives -- similar to the study conducted last year on the atmosphere for gay students.
Finally, the students want the university to apply its standards of diversity to recruiting more conservative professors. The group will present statistics -- department by department -- that show that only a tiny minority of UNC-CH professors are registered Republicans.
"It's like the conservative point of view isn't legitimate. It's not even considered," said Michael McKnight, a senior journalism and mass communications and public policy major from Roanoke Rapids, who is president of the committee.
He's right. I was there for six years. Anyone even remotely conservative was equated with the violent segregationists of the 1960's, and no journalists bothered to contradict this viewpoint. I was fairly protected from most of the lunacy, as a graduate student enrolled in a very un-PC department, but it was crashingly obvious when I went outside my office.
Posted by kswygert at August 18, 2003 11:24 AM