Think for Yourself If You Can, Duke

In a one-year time span, Duke has hosted Angela Davis, Nadine Strossen and Janet Reno. What does this group of distinguished speakers have in common? Davis was a Communist Party USA Vice-Presidential candidate, Strossen serves as national president of the ACLU and Reno was Attorney General in the Clinton administration.

In the same one-year span, we did not see former Vice President Dan Quayle, chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute Ward Connerly or Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese. In this instance, what we did not see is most illustrative of the political debate-or lack thereof-on Duke's campus.

The ideological monochromatism of college campuses, which manifests itself from student programming to faculty composition, is far from a Duke phenomenon. Conservative student groups across the country are forced to rely upon outside funding to pay for club events, and charges of classroom bias are not uncommon. To the average undergraduate student, this monopoly on the marketplace of ideas is boring at best and frustrating at worst. To a casual, conservative observer such as myself, this absence of ideological diversity is a disappointing dilution of the university experience.

The Duke Conservative Union aims to balance political debate on campus. By bringing issues to the discussion table, whether the ideological composition of faculty or the Palestine Solidarity Movement, we hope to foster campus debate at a stage when students are integrating their knowledge and life experiences to form opinions of their own. From our publication New Sense to the lectures financed with our lean organizational budget, we seek to enrich the undergraduate educational experience at Duke University.

Yes, we support free markets, property rights and limited government. But we also support true ideological diversity on our campus and not the hand-waving pseudo-intellectualism that we witness so often. Contrary to a handful of administrators and professors, we believe that Duke students are smart enough to think for themselves.