Thompson Center gives the right a campus voice
In an era where truly unbelievable poll results are released every week, one result stands as one of the most surprising. In a Pew Research poll released in July of last year, 58% of Republicans said they believed American universities actually have a negative impact on the U.S. As recently as 2010, only 32% of Republicans thought colleges did more harm than good — but that number has spiked sharply since 2015.
Campus leadership has noticed. In a recent survey released by Inside Higher Ed, 86% of university presidents said perceived liberal bias on campus was responsible for declining public support for universities.
The idea that college campuses are breeding grounds for liberalism has been around for a century. An article from the Milwaukee Sentinel in March of 1916 reports it has been “long known…that certain radical politicians have not been averse to bringing the university into politics.”
But the stratospheric rise in conservative opposition to higher education in the past few years has challenged university administrators and lawmakers to fix the ideological imbalance. Last year, some Wisconsin lawmakers even suggested withholding funds from the state university system unless ideological diversity on campus was more present.
But campus speech isn’t a zero-sum proposition; simply limiting progressivism by policing the number of liberal speakers and professors on campus doesn’t leave anyone better off. The more reasonable alternative is to make efforts to bring new conservative voices to traditionally liberal campuses and provide them with support.
That is the goal of the recently unveiled Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership on the UW-Madison campus. The center, first announced in May of 2017, was funded with $3 million in the past state budget and aims to provide the university with balanced scholarship.
“In any dialogue, there has to be multiple sides,” Thompson Center director Ryan Owens told me. Owens said the center was “firmly committed” to “reaching across the aisle to make sure all sides of an issue are discussed.”
Criticisms from liberals, and there have been some, elide the fact that UWMadison has long hosted devoted progressive organizations such as the Center on Wisconsin Strategies (COWS) and the Institute for Research on Poverty.
But the Thompson Center’s goal isn’t to be a conservative safe space, it is simply to ensure that some conservative voices are heard on campus.
“To the extent that we’re going to go and reach out to both sides of the aisle, it’s going to look as though there are more Republicans than there have been before, because there are probably going to be more Republicans than there have been before,” Owens said.
Some conservatives argue for bailing out on large public institutions and retreating to conservative private institutions such as Hillsdale College in Michigan, a liberal arts campus adorned by bronze statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But conservatives should focus on more representation in large public universities. That’s exactly what the Thompson Center offers.