Letter to the Editor | Balanced approach needed to tackle right minority issue

How funny that a conservative cries out for affirmative action! Tendai Musakwa’s piece, “Vassar’s liberal environment is stifling the conservative voice” (9.29.2006 issue of The Miscellany News) reveals something really interesting: even conservatives can acknowledge once they’re in the minority that being stifled by a majority stinks. How sad that conservative politicians tend to forget that. Since in the American context, conservative politicians are neither excluded, marginalized, nor otherwise “outside the mainstream,” they typically put down efforts to provide help to minority groups.

Conservatives do not enjoy the luxury of majority status at Vassar. Musakwa called for more tolerance of their viewpoint, a change in the way conservatives are treated on campus.

I’m all for it. Conservatives are not generally well accepted here, at least not as well as they deserve to be. Sometimes their persons are attacked instead of their ideology. There is a lot to learn from the unease felt by conservatives at Vassar.

Take a peek at one “typically” conservative response to the predicament of minority stress, that the minority in question should convince the majority of its importance. That’s what members of the Grand Old Party have been asking of gay people recently. “Can’t? Well then let’s pass that Federal Marriage Amendment.” Isn’t this a tad unfair? For conservatives at Vassar, on the flip side, efforts to convince anyone of the virtues of conservative values is an incredibly steep battle.

I agree with Musakwa that “It is in [Vassar’s] best interest to promote self-expression and acceptance of conservative students and faculty.” Diversity of thought leads to better thoughts, and though Vassar does very well with the latter, it could still use some more of the former. And where is a conservative crying out for “a commonality of purpose to allow the free expression of the socio-political views and ideologies of all students,” for adopting changes that would build a more conservative student body, and for the idea of “hiring more professors who identify themselves as conservative, or encouraging them to apply?” Sounds like an affirmative action plan to me.

I think the idea of the endangered conservative is fundamentally flawed, and that we therefore don’t need to follow all those steps.

But we can’t forget the importance of empathy here at Vassar or in the world, and Vassar liberals or leftists are no exception. While conservatives at Vassar may feel stress as a minority, it doesn’t seem to be a theme that the conservative movements in America, with which they identify at least in name, think much about.

Similarly, while Vassar’s political majority would probably be horrified to be compared to conservative movements, do we not also write off at least one of our minorities here at Vassar, self-identified conservatives? How can we ask to not be written off in society at large if we write people off in our daily lives here on campus?

These are problems for all involved, because there are real consequences to identifying with a political point of view that implicitly or explicitly writes off the pressures associated with being a minority, be it racial, sexual, economic, political, or otherwise. We all have something to learn from this predicament at Vassar. I hope that those who self-identify as conservative at Vassar can bring some understanding to the greater movements afoot in America and the world, and I hope that we Vassar liberals can also put a curb on some of our hypocrisies.
—Morgan Warners ’08