Right-wing commentators relish painting elite college students as ignorant, weak, and unprepared to meet the real world. Students have bolstered this perception by struggling to articulate positions on issues for which they profess deep concern.
But this grim picture leaves out an important distinction: Conservative students, rather than being coddled, face significant intellectual and social challenges in college. These challenges impart educational advantages by forcing conservatives to defend their points of view. Liberal students, surrounded by like-minded peers and mentors, have less opportunity to grow in this way.
At Princeton University, where I have taught political science for seven years, conservative students make up just 12 percent of undergraduates. Throughout college, they hear alternative perspectives and hone their own arguments, anticipating opposition. In research for a book in progress—Tested: Why Conservative Students Get the Most Out of Liberal Education—I conducted dozens of in-depth interviews with students at Princeton and other competitive schools. Of the 28 conservatives I’ve spoken with so far, more than 90 percent report attending events featuring speakers with whom they disagree, compared with less than half of the 15 liberals I’ve interviewed. Nearly all of the conservatives said that they’ve been challenged by professors or other students in classroom discussions, but just two of the liberals said the same. These reports echo national surveys, which find that conservative students are more open to speakers of any ideological bent than are liberal students, who tend to support only speakers they agree with.
[Robert P. George: Universities shouldn’t be ideological churches]
These divergent experiences produce a striking asymmetry in preparedness for policy discussions on many topics: abortion, affirmative action, environmental policy, economics, Israel-Palestine. Conservative students tend to know both sides of the issues cold. For example, though they are typically pro-Israel, I’ve found that they can easily cite critiques of the country’s strategy. “Israel’s military actions make it logistically tougher to get the hostages out,” one conservative student said. “Israel’s actions in Gaza breed more bad will toward Israel in the long run,” said another.
The pro-Palestine students I interviewed, by contrast, couldn’t describe pro-Israel arguments. They often didn’t even want to engage. “It’s too icky,” one student, who identifies as “a leftist or a socialist,” said. When I asked him what Israel should have done differently after October 7, he obfuscated. “That’s where it gets tough,” he said. “Obviously, they can’t do nothing.” Another student who identifies as socialist told me that pro-Palestine students have been “actively doxxed” and “harassed” at Princeton, but he couldn’t provide examples. I asked if he’d spoken with pro-Israel students about the issue. “No,” he said, explaining that pro-Israel students are too “well-connected with national conservative publications producing anti-Palestine propaganda.” He questioned “the ulterior motives” of “Zionist” students.
Abortion is another issue on which conservative students seem to know the weak spots in their position. “The hardest thing to argue against is the ‘where does life begin’ argument,” a pro-life Princeton junior said. “If someone believes a pregnancy is a clump of cells, then I have a hard time arguing against that without bringing in religion.” A pro-life University of Chicago senior said that the “personhood” question gives pro-choicers a strong foundation: To them, “a woman’s right to her body is the most important thing, because there is only one person, not two people, being considered.”
But the pro-choice students I interviewed hadn’t thought much about the other side. “I think pro-life people are just pro-life because that’s what their family believes,” a Wake Forest junior said. “Do you think there should be any restrictions at all on abortion?” I asked. “I don’t really think that’s an issue,” because late-term abortions “are so infrequent,” she said after a long pause.
Some conservatives see a direct connection between their experience defending their views on campus and their success after graduation. Abigail Anthony, a conservative 2023 Princeton graduate, now a reporter at National Review, made her first big journalistic splash as a student: She wrote a 2021 National Review article about how Princeton ignored COVID policies to allow a social-justice event but invoked them to prevent students from attending Easter Mass. Anthony said that the article led to the reopening of the campus chapel. The following year, she wrote another National Review op-ed criticizing Princeton’s Ballet Club for its Instagram statement claiming that the group is “complicit” in “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” This article received even more attention and prompted Anthony’s removal from all Ballet Club communications. The thick skin Anthony grew as a conservative at Princeton has already benefited her journalism career, in which she regularly takes on powerful institutions and popular opinions. “I was prompted to defend my own views and commit them to print, and it toughens you up for sure,” she told me.
[Alan Jacobs: Creating conservative universities is not the answer]
Other conservative students at Princeton have also emerged more resilient than when they started. Both Danielle Shapiro and Alexandra Orbuch, Jewish student journalists covering pro-Palestine protests, received “no-communication orders”—university directives that bar students from communicating with one another—from pro-Palestine Princeton students after Shapiro and Orbuch reported on public events on campus.
In response, Shapiro wrote a scathing Wall Street Journal article, “I Committed Journalism, and Princeton Told Me Not to Communicate.” Orbuch enlisted the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Anti-Defamation League. “I got pushed off from one person to another, and I wasn’t able to accomplish anything until I brought in outside lawyers,” Orbuch told me. Less than a week after a FIRE/ADL letter condemning the orders, Princeton changed its policy.
Who is better prepared for life after college: the conservative students who learned how to mobilize the nation’s leading publications and free-speech organizations, or the progressive students who tried to censor peers for documenting a public protest? I think it’s the former.
So do conservative students. Shapiro said that her first year at Princeton was “like boot camp.” She would read her peers’ Instagram posts and ask herself, “Why is that point they made wrong? Why do I disagree with it? Every single day, I’m getting sharper and sharper, and they’re not, because they’re not hearing the other side … How can you have a good argument against an argument you’ve never heard before?”
Conservative culture warriors argue that education at highly selective colleges is worthless, and recommend that conservative students who don’t want to be silenced or indoctrinated opt out. I disagree. Conservative students experience what higher education has long claimed to offer: exposure to different perspectives, regular practice building and defending coherent arguments, intellectual challenges that spur creativity and growth. Liberal academia has largely robbed liberal students of these rewards.
