We need more conservatives at Brown. We need to actively recruit and welcome them as faculty, administrators and staff, invited speakers, but above all as students.
You don’t have to be conservative to agree with this. If you’re progressive — as I am — you may feel that conservative ideas are misguided, sometimes harmful, and even hateful. That perspective is legitimate! But a lack of conservatives creates an unhealthy political monoculture, and undermines our community’s social and class diversity. It makes it hard for our current, disproportionately privileged students to communicate with the world outside the academy.
Brown is overwhelmingly progressive. Based on outside polling, Brown has 8.7 liberal students for every conservative one. In the Herald’s poll of incoming members of the class of 2027, 72% students identified themselves as liberal and 6% as conservative, a ratio of 12 to 1. (The rest identified as moderate or independent.) The subset who called themselves “very liberal” and “very conservative” were, respectively, 30% and less than 1%. This is not surprising: at selective colleges, students and faculty tend to come from professional families who invest heavily in their kids’ education, and this population has moved left over the decades.
We also know that politically engaged progressives, nationally, are an affluent and privileged group of people. The Hidden Tribes survey found that those most passionate about politics, both left and right, are richer and more educated than the average American, and that the most progressive segment of society is economically better-off than the most conservative.
The children of low-income families tend to be less politically engaged than the children of well-educated professionals, but are more likely to be religious and to hold socially conservative beliefs which a lot of Brown students would find unacceptable. Making such students unwelcome by treating their ideas as taboo, is unfair to them. It undercuts our self-image as an inclusive institution.
Along with conservative students, the University should recruit conservative faculty and administrators. Unlike in the case of students, this is not really a matter of fairness. Well-educated conservatives could choose to work at colleges with a student body more aligned with their beliefs. But we want faculty who will normalize conservative ideas for our students (and for their own colleagues) and teach classes with conservative perspectives. We want administrators who will make conservative students feel visible, safe and respected.
We owe this not just to our conservative students, but to our progressive ones. If they have little direct contact with conservative beliefs, apart from a sense that they are alien and harmful, they’ll graduate into a society they are poorly prepared to navigate. They will have little capacity to engage with many of the ideas they’ll encounter, and they’ll be alienated from the people who hold them, who are likely to be less privileged than themselves.
I don’t want to minimize the challenge that political diversity will pose at Brown. Diversity brings conflict. For progressives, conservative beliefs are often dehumanizing to marginalized people. Fox News laughs about “snowflakes” who can’t bear to be offended, but the fact is, words can cause lasting wounds. Some conservatives believe that sex between people of the same gender is wrong; that being transgender is a mental illness; that climate change and COVID are “hoaxes”; that abortion and birth control should be prohibited; that husbands should have authority over their wives. While these beliefs are held by many Americans, they can cause harm to those who encounter them. (Similarly, conservatives suffer harm from speech that undermines their own core values.) A more diverse Brown might be, for many students, a less safe, more toxic environment.
We can mitigate these risks by practicing informal norms of courtesy in conversation, just like in conversations with strangers outside Brown, where we don’t assume that everyone in the room agrees with us. But in public settings, where listeners may opt out, conservatives as well as progressives will say controversial, upsetting things. Progressives and conservatives will still hate each other’s ideas (and perhaps avoid one another), but will accept that those ideas have social currency and legitimacy equal to their own. They’ll experience Brown as a microcosm of the larger society, not an oasis from it.
But how could we get from here to there? Not by any kind of coercion (let alone the kind of toxic government intervention being attempted in some red states today), not by quotas in admissions or hiring, and not by discriminating against progressives.
What I am urging instead is for Brown to embrace the importance of political diversity, and say so — repeatedly. When the president speaks about our aspirations, she should mention political diversity, using language like: “at Brown we welcome both progressives and conservatives.” When we solicit applications for a faculty or staff position, the announcement should encourage people of all political viewpoints to apply. We should take steps to enrich the applicant pool for conservative candidates who might not otherwise feel welcome applying for a position at Brown.
In undergraduate admissions, we should use similarly inclusive language, and we should expand the pool by reaching out to conservative communities: to churches, labor unions, military families. Low-income families — whatever their politics — don’t typically know that selective colleges like Brown offer generous financial aid, unless someone tells them.
Those with the interest and qualifications to come to Brown, as students or faculty, will still skew left. That’s the nature of our University’s cultural landscape. But even if it takes a lot of work to shift the ratio a little bit, it’s worth the effort.
You may object that if we value pluralism, the way to get there is through institutional neutrality. Perhaps officially mentioning politics at all, let alone encouraging a particular viewpoint, is a mistake. But a 12 to 1 imbalance won’t correct itself by being ignored. Reaching out to conservatives doesn’t negate institutional neutrality — it makes it possible. I want Brown to do everything in its power to build a politically diverse community. If you’re progressive, you should want that too.
Jeremy Mumford is an associate professor of history and can be reached at jeremy_mumford@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
