More LGBT students than conservatives: Something’s wrong with this demographic picture
At Yale, in an almost-too-perfect encapsulation of the campus political problem, it turns out that freshmen LGBTQ students outnumber conservative freshmen by a significant margin: Ten percent of Yale first-years identify as conservative, while over 20 percent identify somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum. Queer students even outnumber other sizable demographics like Catholics.
To say that LGBTQ individuals are overrepresented at Yale is an understatement: Reliable surveys calculate that around 4.5 percent of Americans identify as somewhere in that group. To find such sizable numbers on one college campus surely represents a smashing demographic coup. It is also, of course, a pointed reminder of just how ideologically crippled Yale’s campus is. Conservatives greatly outnumber LGBTQ individuals in the rest of American life, and there is little reason that the former should be so much less numerous than the latter on campus. That’s not a moral judgment—queer students have just as much a right to education as anyone. It is, rather, a practical assessment: Something at Yale, and indeed at a great many campuses in this country, is plainly hostile to conservatives.
We know what the reason is, of course: Students, administrators, professors and many other people involved in higher education are overwhelmingly progressive, and many of those people are not just opposed to conservative belief but positively malicious towards it and the people who express it. That is a problem for higher education, which has kneecapped itself with a largely monochromatic and one-sided socio-political environment. Diversity of belief is critically important to a meaningful and fulfilling education. There are other important types of diversity as well, of course, but if everyone is thinking, and talking, and believing the same way on campus, you haven’t got much of a university; you’ve got something more like an expensive and expansive social club, which is good for socializing but not so good for expanding one’s mind.
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