About the Columbia Conservative Alumni Association
The Columbia Conservative Alumni Association was founded in 1999 to restore ideological balance to Columbia University in New York City.
Like most American universities, Columbia is dominated by an ignorant and intolerant left-wing orthodoxy known as political correctness which poses as the moral consensus of educated society. This orthodoxy works its harm both by hysterical outbursts and by its insidious ability to drag the parameters of acceptable debate inexorably to the left.
Of course, Columbia has many qualities which we respect and cherish. It remains a community of authentically high intellect, indeed part of the very elite of the nation if its alumni roster and current admissions numbers are to be believed. It is thankfully not the most liberal school in the Ivy League, let alone the nation. It has a core curriculum that has withstood, with some scars, the best efforts of the academic Left to replace it with the bookish fads of the day. Its students have a skepticism that preserves many of them from ideological enthusiasms that bite deeply on lesser campuses. We are proud and loyal alumni.
But the crisis remains. If the ideas of the Left flourish unchallenged they will eventually destroy all of this. Academic excellence and even simple fairness will be sacrificed to a political agenda with no known limits. This has happened at other universities and it could happen here.
It is our goal to make sure it does not.
Those without a personal connection to Columbia may wonder whether one university matters in the greater scheme of things. But the man who elected Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos, and the man who re-elected him, Dick Morris, are both Columbia graduates, and if they had encountered a more ideologically balanced university, their careers might have taken a different direction, with palpable consequences. Columbia has a long history of political significance, from the hatching of the New Deal Brain Trust to the birth of progressive education at Teachers College. And it is our hope that our example may spur the formation of similar organizations at other universities.
We are neither country-club Republicans nor conspiracy theorists; we are intellectually serious fighting conservatives. We do not aim to be hostile to the current liberal administration, and are indeed willing to support its position on certain issues, such as the university labor unions and housing policy, where we agree. But it is they who have turned our university, whose proper role is as a forum for the open discussion of every point of view, into a left-wing shill. So we must fight back if Columbia is to regain the ideological openness that is implied in the very idea of a university.
President George Rupp is a committed academic leftist, and has many times demonstrated that he will do everything he can to betray these ideals. The administration clearly believes it is the very soul of fairness, but its behavior unfortunately shows otherwise. Currently, it has no incentive at all to respect the elementary virtues of free speech and even-handedness, as nobody protests when it misbehaves.
