Republicans To Publish Conservative Guide

The Harvard Republican Club (HRC) will make its contribution to the growing number of guides for students.

At tomorrow’s meeting, the group will focus on organizing a guide they said will help conservative students select teachers and navigate Harvard’s social landscape.

“The baseline goal will be to create a means by which conservatives can find a political outlet in the classroom,” said HRC board member Joshua M. Mendelsohn ’05. “We want to provide conservative students with information you could never find in the CUE Guide.”

HRC members said the guide would be published by spring. They do not yet have a cost estimate for the project, but have applied for a grant from the Undergraduate Council.

The guide will also include background information on specific classes and conservative organizations.

A main goal of the guide will also be to direct student to teachers that are receptive to conservative ideas.

The guide will highlight IBM Professor of Business and Government Roger G. Porter, Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth Wisse, and Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53.

Mansfield said that he hopes the HRC guide will not just list conservative professors and their courses.

“It should list those courses that are honest—those that don’t assume all decent people hold one political opinion and those that don’t suggest that liberalism is the only decent way to think,” Mansfield said.

HRC members said they decided to create a guide in order to combat

the relative difficulty that students, especially freshman, face in locating Harvard’s conservative scene.

“We want to reveal to students where you can go to escape from a liberal whitewashed world,” Mendelsohn said.

Mansfield said there is more support for conservative students on campus than there has been in past years. He pointed to an increased membership of the HRC and the growth of The Salient, a conservative biweekly magazine.

“Conservative students here aren’t altogether and unbearably lost in a crowd of liberals,” Mansfield said.

The project will join a proliferation of student guides, which already includes the CUE guide, the Unofficial Guide to Life Harvard, the Women’s Guide to Harvard and a Harvard Asian American Society guide to Harvard.

The Guide to Black Life at Harvard is also in the process of publication.

HRC members said they want the guide to serve as a resource for all students, not just political conservatives at Harvard.

“Hopefully, it will make every Harvard student’s transition to and stay in college more pleasant and rewarding,” said Boleslaw Z. Kabala ’03, director of the project, in an e-mail.

Writers of the guide will include members of the HRC, The Harvard Right to Life and The Salient.