Guess what, freshman conservative college student? In a couple of weeks you’re going to have your liberal campus and its professors shove more crap down your throat than Rosie does her gullet during Chili’s Monday Night Nacho Monster Blowout Special, that’s what.

In his weekly column over at Townhall.com, Doug Giles lists ten tips for young conservatives to survive college, “the Liberal’s madrasah” where “purveyors of the anti-American propaganda” deliver “the liberal Kool-Aid crunch” in every classroom. Giles warns:

Your values, for the next four years, will be violated much like Linsday Lohan’s nose, liver, Mercedes and panties have been for the last five years.

Interesting imagery Giles uses to make his point.

Giles’ claim that American colleges are brainwashing shops of the left and breeding grounds for socialists is nothing new. (Speaking of socialism, if anyone reminds me of Stalin, it’s “right-wingers” like David Horowitz who advocate suppression of free exchange of ideas on campus through heavy-handed legislation, not the humanities professors he likes to gang up on.)

But refuting this claim and taking on those who would restrict free exchange has been done over and over on this site. Instead, I want to address an argument from the comments section on Giles’ article. The blogger Hound Dog writes:

Liberalism, via the 60's hippies, has had their [sic] say. In the next ten years, a shift to the right will take place on campuses. Five years ago, you would never have seen a college Republican club. The children of the hippies, like the hippies themselves in their youth, are rebelling. They want to be just the opposite of their liberal parents.

The hey day of bell-bottoms and unprotected sex which Hound Dog seems to associate with “liberalism,” may be in the past, but liberal thought on campuses isn’t going anywhere. Right-wing ideologues are kidding themselves if they think young people are going to swing to the right just to be contrarian. Students are smarter than that and polls show it. Hound Dog suggests the last five years have injected new life into college Republicans, but the data suggests otherwise. According to a Democracy Corps report published Friday, “young people [are] profoundly alienated from the Republican Party.”

That said, young conservatives should be welcome to voice their opinions on campus the way other students do, through discussion in the classroom and activism outside of it. Unfortunately, many on the right seem to think the only way to make themselves heard is by getting professors they disagree with fired.