Bleeding-Heart Conservatives

Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, Kenan professor of government, has been enjoying some unaccustomed good publicity lately. A picture of Mansfield, over the caption "Prince of the Conservatives," graces the cover of the current issue of Harvard Magazine. The New York Times is writing a profile of the outspoken professor, who over the years has been repeatedly vilified by students and fellow Faculty members for his views on everything from homosexuality to grade inflation. Cultural conservatism, it would seem, is suddenly en vogue at Harvard.

But there's a strange twist to the attention the media has lavished on conservative students and faculty lately. For the most part, they deal only superficially with the substantive political issues setting conservatives and liberals apart. Instead, the theme of the Harvard Magazine article--which doesn't even pretend to be objective--is that conservatives are Harvard's newest minority, a group of students stifled by a dominant liberal orthodoxy. We're supposed to come away from the article believing that at Harvard, conservatives are somehow being oppressed.

Janet Tessler, who wrote the Harvard Magazine article, isn't the only one to fall for this currently fashionable fiction. An article published by Newhouse News Service this February concluded that conservatives are the "real minority" at Ivy League colleges.

And conservatives, always so quick to deride the suggestion that racial minorities may still be victims of prejudice, seem ever so eager to claim that mantle for themselves. Last year, a group of conservatives held a "coming out" dinner, all but explicitly suggesting that being a conservative at Harvard was comparable to being a closeted homosexual. As one of the event's planners explained, "It's really just an event to show that there is a strong Republican community at Harvard and that no one should feel intimidated to share his or her political beliefs."

Be still, my bleeding heart.

It's hard to take such ridiculous misappropriations of the language of the gay rights movement seriously. I feel like I should be offended, but events like the "coming out" dinner are so pathetic I'm not.

It's true that political conservatives are outnumbered here, both among the student body and on the Faculty. Harvard used to be nicknamed the "Kremlin on the Charles." The Harvard Salient, a conservative biweekly, polled professors a few years ago and found only a handful who would admit to being registered Republicans. It surprised no one when Bill Clinton thrashed Bob Dole in a 1996 campus poll conducted by The Crimson.

But to suggest that this translates into a prejudice against conservatives--as events like a "coming out" dinner and articles like Tessler's do--is absurd. The last two presidents of the Undergraduate Council have been Republicans. As far as I know, conservatives are not shunned socially. No one is committing hate crimes against Salient staffers. In fact, the vast majority of people at Harvard couldn't care less about the political outlook of their classmates.

Still, the strange victimhood complex among conservatives at Harvard persists. It's a shame Harvard Magazine gave credence to the assertion that conservatives are an embattled minority at Harvard in the same sense racial minorities and homosexuals were in the past.

Harvey Mansfield will always take plenty of criticism every time he opens his mouth. But he's a big boy, he can take it. So can the rest of the conservatives at Harvard, who should stop mistaking opposition to their ideas for opposition to their right to speak them. Inventing a vast left-wing conspiracy bent on stifling conservative voices is a pretty weak way to advance real political debate on the Harvard campus.

At some point, conservatives at Harvard need to calm down, get over themselves and realize that no one is out to get them. The Man, safely occupied elsewhere, is not putting them down.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column will appear biweekly.