The left is on the rise.
College students are more liberal today than at any time since the Vietnam War, according to The American Freshman Survey released this year.
Conducted by University of California-Los Angeles’ Higher Education Research Institute, the University of California and the American Council on Education, the annual survey asked 281,064 incoming freshmen at 421 four-year colleges and universities about their political views.
The liberal trend holds among Northwestern students, with liberals outnumbering both conservatives and their middle-of-the-road peers, according to statistics from the survey, released in April, of incoming freshman in 2000-01.
Despite NU’s liberal leanings, the majority of national respondents identified themselves as “middle of the road,” neither liberal nor conservative. Almost 30 percent described themselves as liberal or far left and 20 percent described themselves as conservative or far right.
As for incoming NU freshmen, the survey found that 44.1 percent identified themselves as liberal, 18.6 percent as conservative and 36.3 percent as in-between. NU has participated in the ACE/UCLA survey since 1966, said Bill Hayward, NU’s director of analytical studies.
The national survey also reported that students’ participation in organized demonstrations during the past year reached an all-time high of 47.5 percent. At NU, only 23.5 percent of respondents said they had participated in an organized demonstration.
Pete Micek, a Medill junior and member of Northwestern Students Against Sweatshops, said activism entails more than just visible protests.
“I have friends who are out looking for activist jobs, who are looking for a think tank to be involved with, but aren’t necessarily out protesting,” Micek said.
Kenneth Janda, an NU political science professor, said, “There’s a tendency to say, ‘Oh, Northwestern students are apathetic and conservative,’ but both are wrong.
“It’s just that students tend to get active when things happen,” Janda said
Though some of the 2001 freshman surveys were administered after Sept. 11, the majority were completed prior to it, and thus do not reflect student’s reactions to those events.
“You can be assured that we will be looking at questions that give us hints about the stress level and general emotional state of our respondents (since Sept. 11),” said Bill Korn, associate director for operations at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.