Young Conservatives Find Their Voice on America’s Campuses

By Julia Steinberg | Commentary, The Atlantic

College campuses today have a reputation for being hostile to right-leaning students. As a recent graduate who became a conservative in college, I can’t say I entirely agree. Yes, we’re outnumbered, and yes, our ideas often get disregarded. Being a conservative might be socially disadvantageous. But if you want to know where the real political energy is on campuses, it’s on the right.

The recent killing of Charlie Kirk, and the flood of interest in his organization, Turning Point USA, has drawn attention to college students’ appetite for conservative ideas. I was not particularly inspired by Kirk in my personal ideological transformation as a student at Stanford University; Turning Point didn’t have much of a presence on campus while I was there. But one principle he stood for—the celebration of debate, of a marketplace of ideas—is what first appealed to me about the right.

I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021 as a progressive from Los Angeles, where most of my peers and I had thought of conservatives as, essentially, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stanford Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the leftist magazine, The Stanford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op houses, communal living spaces largely focused on left-leaning activism.

As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else. Rather than “I disagree with so-and-so,” it was more socially acceptable to say “piggybacking on so-and-so’s point,” even if there was a disagreement. When I finally found someone willing to have an extended intellectual debate with me—my problem-set partner for a logic course—I was interested to learn that he was a staff writer at the Stanford Review, the conservative publication on campus. He invited me to a meeting during winter quarter, and, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to attend.

What I saw there was the opposite of what I’d found in my classes: Students were encouraged to disagree with one another. At each meeting, students had to present—and defend—the articles they were working on; then the group would debate three topics, such as how the U.S. should respond to the war in Ukraine and whether Silicon Valley’s relevance was waning. I kept going back to Review meetings, but I didn’t tell many of my friends—I didn’t want to be judged. Because of COVID restrictions, clubs at Stanford could meet in person only if they gathered outside. Each Monday night, I bundled up in thermal tights, gloves, and a heavy coat and slipped out of my dorm room.

When I pitched my first article for the Review—an essay arguing, partly based on my own experience, that COVID restrictions were shifting Stanford students to the right—I got helpful pushback on the idea from my peers at the publication. How could COVID, rather than administrative bloat or the unrest in the summer of 2020, be the causal mechanism? And were Stanford students even moving to the right? I went ahead with the article, and found, as I wrote, that the give-and-take during my presentation had prepared me to anticipate and address opposing arguments. I joined the staff of the Review during my freshman spring, started identifying as a conservative as a sophomore, and served as editor in chief of the publication during my senior year.

I am hardly the first person to change his or her political views in college. I’m also hardly the first person to find conservatism on Stanford’s campus. The Stanford Review was founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel and Norman Book, both undergraduates at the time, as part of a larger movement that opposed the removal of a required “Western Culture” course from the curriculum. Many of my Review friends shared a similar trajectory to mine: They came into college as liberals and, seeking a place for debate, turned to conservative spaces on campus. Then they were persuaded by the conservative ideas themselves.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE ATLANTIC

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