Unfair Exchange

Conservatives say they want free speech on campus—but they just like to hear themselves talk.

By Tim Fernholz, Georgetown University

Conservative pundit Fred Barnes started his Take Back Georgetown Day (TBGD) speech with a story about anti-choice Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, who often debated abortion with pro-choice Republican Rep. Millicent Fenwick. One day, Fenwick came up to Hyde after a long floor battle, asking him to stop raising the issue that was dividing them. Hyde replied that he could never stop fighting abortion because he was adopted, and he was grateful every day that his mother didn’t have an abortion. Chastened by Hyde’s story, Fenwick didn’t debate him again. But that wasn’t the punch line. Hyde, Barnes said, had been lying. He wasn’t adopted at all – but he won the argument. The nearly two hundred conservative students in the room burst into laughter.

TBGD, sponsored by the Georgetown University College Republicans, claims to be the largest student-run conservative conference in the country. Judging from the 200 to 300 attendees, that may be unlikely, but it very well could have been the blandest conservative conference in the country: It had a minimum of wing-nuts and a maximum of bland platitudes. But after all the workshops on privatization and the speeches about beating Democrats in 2006, the conference revealed that campus conservatives are still trying to use self-victimization and identity politics to fire up their base and make progressives look bad.

TBGD is intended to “[S]howcase our strength and solidarity and invoke a sense of camaraderie and confidence,” according to Alex Bozmoski, the Georgetown sophomore who led the planning of the event. Others I spoke to talked about empowering conservatives. But do conservatives really need a sense of confidence – don’t they control the entire federal government?

Campus conservatives figured out a long time ago that stealing New Left identity politics was a smart strategy. Dinesh D’Souza and David Horowitz made careers – and news – out of complaining they were discriminated against for their political beliefs. Since then, campus political arguments have ended with conservatives saying liberals want to silence them. Horowitz even started a campaign to bring “Academic Freedom” to campuses (more on that later). Conservatives love this rhetoric of victimization—look how Bill O’Reilly created ”The War on Christmas” from a few scattered news reports about crèche-placement arguments and transformed it into full fledged assault on his values. Playing the prosecuted underdog makes people feel good—and it makes people want to fight back.

Georgetown probably has more conservatives than most major universities, with robust chapters of the College Republicans and Knights of Columbus. Condoms aren’t sold on campus and in 2002 the University rejected a student proposal for a LGBTQ Resource Center (the University now has an LGBTQ Coordinator). There are two conservative newspapers published on campus, The Academy and The Federalist, and conservative viewpoints are aired in the mainstream campus papers; conservative speakers arrive regularly. It’s clear that the conservative voice is heard. But, as at most major universities, the faculty is predominately liberal.

Or rather, they predominantly don’t like President Bush. The Hoya, one of Georgetown’s campus newspapers, reported that an overwhelming majority of faculty and staff who donated money to 2004 presidential general election candidates donated to John Kerry’s campaign. Polls of faculties around the country, including at Georgetown, report that faculties lean left. Naturally, the campus conservatives take offense at this.

Here’s where David Horowitz—whose Mao-esque little red books were distributed at TBGD—comes back in. His Academic Freedom campaign encourages students and state legislatures alike to pass resolutions condemning “political intimidation” and “grade discrimination.” Anyone opposing this campaign is labeled “anti-Free Speech.” Georgetown conservatives, copying language directly from Horowitz, put forth just such a resolution in the student government, but also including language commending TBGD.

The principal sponsor of the resolution, a freshman named Anthony Bonna, told me he was inspired to write it after realizing that the University’s Bias Reporting system included protection for “gender ID, family responsibility, accent and race, but no real protection for Academic Freedom.” The system does say that “the University values freedom of expression and the open exchange of ideas and, in particular, the expression of controversial ideas and differing views is a vital part of the University discourse,” but Bonna must have missed that.

I hadn’t realized that Academic Freedom needed protecting, so I made sure to ask Bonna and every other conservative I spoke to at TBGD about their experiences with academic discrimination as the most vocal conservatives on campus. Unfortunately, besides vague anecdotes about eye-rolling and the occasional Bush bash, nobody came up with specific names, situations or incidents of serious harassment or grade discrimination. More than one told me proudly that they didn’t feel uncomfortable because they are the kind of people who stood up for their beliefs in any situation.

But the problem with the conservative argument is its hypocrisy. Even as I interviewed Bonna about the Academic Freedom resolution, he wanted to tell me about how he was planning a protest against a campus performance of the Vagina Monologues. Whether it’s Barnes’ Hyde story or the fact that Horowitz isn’t agitating for free speech for liberals at Bob Jones University, it’s clear that conservatives don’t care about debate, they just want to win. When I asked attendees about free speech on the Bill O’Reilly show or congressional Democrats being locked out of conference committees (where a bill’s details are negotiated), most attendees dodged the questions. Bozmoski told me that private news shows were dictated by free enterprise while Congress is in “the people’s hands.”

Universities need both conservative and liberal viewpoints. Most have them, despite the fear mongering of conservatives against “liberal academia.” Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg (introduced at the conference, accurately, as “a gadfly for his generation”), made one good point in between his constant one-liners: Conservatives come out of universities as better debaters than liberals because their ideas get challenged every day. And he may be right: most progressives could use more experience in the battle of ideas. To fight this conservative free speech smoke screen, progressives need to make sure that people know they want free debate not only on campus but in the media and in Congress, too.

As for Congress, when Rep. Roy Blunt, likely its next majority leader, came to the podium for his turn to rail against the government and the Democrats, he noted that he had once been the president of a college—one of the toughest political jobs he ever had. The problem, a friend told him, was that all the professors were smarter than him. I bet they were all liberal, too.

Tim Fernholz is the Senior Writer at the Georgetown Voice and an intern at The New Republic.

Fred Barnes, Executive Editor of The Weekly Standard, shares a laugh with an enthralled conference attendee. Barnes opened his address by reflecting on the humorous way congressmen lie to their own colleagues.

Rep. Roy Blunt explains to the students how much easier his job is now that he works with less intelligent people.

Photos: Jilliene Helman/The Georgetown Voice

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