Yale remains deeply unwelcoming to students with conservative political beliefs, according to a new but massively unsurprising Yale Daily News survey distributed in October and reported last week.
Of the 2,054 respondents who completed the survey —about 38 % of all Yale undergrads— nearly 75 percent said they believe Yale does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues. Among the 12 percent of respondents who described themselves as either “conservative” or “very conservative,” nearly 95 percent said the Yale community does not welcome their opinions. About two-thirds of respondents who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal” said Yale is not welcoming to conservative students.
More than 98 percent of respondents said Yale is welcoming to students with liberal beliefs, a finding we suspected all along. And among students who described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” 85 percent said they are “comfortable” or “very comfortable” sharing their political views in campus discussions. That leaves a puzzling 15 % thinking, for whatever reason, that voicing liberal ideas is a dicey thing to do at Yale.
A 2015 article in the Harvard Crimson’s weekly magazine reported many conservative students at Harvard College believe their political opinions are neither respected nor appreciated. And in a recent article in The College Fix, a conservative online news outlet, a student at Columbia said that he feared he would be “physically assaulted” if he displayed conservative images or slogans on his clothing.
In an interview with the News, Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway said the results of the survey were lamentable but unsurprising. Holloway attributed conservative students’ discomfort at sharing their views partly to the pervasiveness of social media.
“So much of your generation’s world is managed through smartphones. There’s no margin anymore for saying something stupid,” Holloway said. “People have been saying “dumb things forever, but when I was your age word of mouth would take a while. Now it’s instantaneous, now context is stripped away.”
Holloway added that Yale is one of many liberal arts universities where conservative views are highly unpopular, noting that in election years the political environment can become especially heated.
Attempting to walk his statements back, Dean Holloway said, “In no way did I intend to imply that the views of any student or faculty were stupid or should be dismissed. I meant to lament the fact that meaningful conversations were too often reduced or misconstrued in the shortened messages of social media, leading to a lack of understanding. I apologize if my words were misconstrued and taken to mean anything otherwise.”
A friend, a Yale grad who read about the survey in the Yale Daily News, offered this comment: The best part of the article is the italicized correction at the end, where Dean Holloway tries to walk back his quote earlier in the piece explaining that the reason conservative Yalies are intimidated is that social media now punishes people for saying stupid things. He called after the article appeared to have them add a note saying he wasn’t trying to suggest that conservatives are stupider than liberals — but of course that’s the only way the quote makes any sense. It was a classic Kinseyan gaffe: he accidentally said what he really thought. (And then was stupid enough to draw attention to it with a correction — God, what a feckless and hapless bunch of administrators at Yale.)
