Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are breeding grounds for the most prominent conservatives. Yes, you read that right. Or did you?
It’s no doubt true that Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo, and Robert Bork attended Harvard Law, while Ben Sasse attended Harvard undergrad. Tom Cotton got his BA and JD at Harvard. William F. Buckley, Ron De Santis and George W. Bush attended Yale undergrad, while Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Pat Robertson attended Yale Law. Steve Forbes attended Princeton undergrad, so did Cruz, so did Reagan chief of staff and Treasury secretary James Baker. The list is long, and it’s getting longer.
Still, were they indoctrinated into conservatism at these schools? It’s more likely they arrived that way. Which should be the point.
Except that seemingly not a week goes by that some conservative professor or pundit isn’t publicly wringing his or her hands over the alleged tendency of elite colleges and universities to not produce conservatives, but socialists. Lebanon Valley College professor Kimberlee Josephson is the latest, but surely not the last to feed the flock this way.
Writing at the Wall Street Journal (“How Colleges Produce Socialists”), Josephson ascribed the alleged turn to socialism as environmental. Allegedly the youngsters arrive at “the most selective colleges and universities” only to find that everything’s free!
Somehow blind to the no free goods truth Josephson and other college educated conservatives surely learned in hardscrabble fashion back when college apparently kept it real or whatever, these innocent souls, away for the first time, suddenly experience rides on “campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.”
According to Josephson, this warping of these young, powerless minds is an effect of them experiencing “consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Yikes?
While conservatives used to properly disdain victim talk from the left, they’re now the self-proclaimed victims. That’s because everyone – K-12 schools, colleges, the "corporate media," big business, the NFL, the NBA, the WNBA – is really mean to them. And if it's not others being mean to them, the undeniable fruits of the profit motive are supposedly making otherwise conservative minds less so. Conservatives are never at fault, but others are routinely doing them wrong.
As Josephson sees it, the wrong is an “amenities arms race” among colleges largely funded by the capitalist alums of these schools that has supposedly made kids at elite schools hate wealth. Except that the world’s greatest businesses continue to heavily recruit at the very schools that Josephson claims are creating socialists. If the professor is to be believed, donations from past students who somehow emerged from these elite schools with postive views about wealth creation have made the new recruits view it negatively. "This time is different?" One guesses.
Except that the supposedly incipient socialism on campus lamented by Josephson is a lament that well predates Josephson’s arrival on this earth, and certainly her time on campus. What’s comical is that alarmism about it frequently comes from people who powerfully adore a White House occupant who routinely buys government stakes in private companies, threatens the most successful ones with antitrust lawsuits, "protects" still others with tariffs, and who aims to bail out the failures. But no, it wouldn’t be the look of conservativism that's instigating disdain for conservatism, would it?
It’s a question at least worth asking by conservatives. Paraphrasing the old line about what happens when a Democrat runs again a Democrat, when a socialist runs against a socialist, a socialist always wins.
