Eighty-two percent of Yale students planned to vote for Kamala Harris, compared to 8 percent for Donald Trump and two percent for Green nominee Jill Stein, according to the Yale Daily News.
Forty-two percent of undergraduates identified as "very left-leaning" and 33.7 percent as "somewhat left -leaning" with only 11.7 percent as "moderate," 7.6 percent "somewhat right-leaning" and 4.1 percent "very right-leaning." Graduate students tilt even farther to the left.
"We envy" our conservative classmates, write liberal undergraduates in The Free Press (republished from Publius). While liberals are "cushioned" from criticism, conservatives are constantly challenged to defend their beliefs and understand left-wing arguments. That pressure "cultivates resilience, critical reflection, and the capacity to find community amid disagreement."
Liberals don't need to make nuanced arguments, the Publius students write Repeating a popular slogan is good enough.
"Discuss controversial ideas with friends whose opinions diverge from your own," they conclude. "And if all of your friends share your political views, make some new ones."
A Harvard Crimson editorial accuses conservatives of "hiding" in new clubs formed to discuss philosophy, classics and the humanities. "Conservative students in these organizations should step out of the shadows and into the broader intellectual life of the University."
Harvard pushed out conservatives, responds Leo A. Koerner of the John Adams Society, so they built "new institutions where we could explore ideas freely and . . . host guests with whom we genuinely want to engage — not those whom the campus deems safe enough."
Students live in a political echo chamber, wrote University of North Carolina student journalists in a Daily Tarheel editorial. They urged "humility" on election-shocked students. "We enshrined our political opinions as fact and then refused to defend them — uttering, instead, the hallowed words: 'it isn’t my responsibility to educate you'.”
At Boston College, Republicans complain that personal attacks on conservative students have escalated since the election, reports Lindsay Shachnow on Boston.com.
“Conservative students have been targeted on social media and on campus, being told that they condone rape, sexism, racism, and every other ‘ism’ in the English dictionary,” the club’s executive board wrote an op-ed in The Heights, BC’s student newspaper.
Students are reluctant to discuss some controversial issues with those who might disagree, writes Joseph M. Knippenberg, a professor of politics at Oglethorpe University in Georgia, on the Martin Center blog.
In a study by the Jim Joseph Foundation, more than 70 percent of students who oppose the state of Israel said their friends have similar views. About 20 percent of non-Jews said they wouldn't be friends with someone who supports Israel. "If they don’t interact with supporters of Israel and don’t want to interact with them, they can’t learn," the professor writes.
Pro-Israel students are more likely to have friends with diverse viewpoints, the survey found. They're the minority.
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