Conservative students on Northwestern’s campus know their politics are unpopular. According to The Daily’s Spring Campus Poll, more than 80% of NU students identify either as somewhat or very liberal, compared to the 4.7% of students who identify as either somewhat or very conservative.
In spite of this, the students helming NU’s conservative student organizations say they are not particularly concerned with how their views shape their peers’ perceptions of them. NU College Republicans Treasurer Luca Casler-Bustamante said he estimates the general perception of his organization on campus ranges anywhere from “normal dorks at best” to “antisocial” and “nerdy” at worst.
Acknowledging the minority status of Republicans on campus, NUCR President and Weinberg senior Jeanine Yuen told The Daily she sees the relationship between right-leaning students and the rest of the campus body as strained.
“Everyone that disagrees with Republicans makes it known that they hate Republicans,” Yuen said. “I don’t think that’s the way it should be. I think there should be a peaceful coexistence.”
Yuen, who has been a member of the NUCR since transferring to NU her sophomore year, is the daughter of the club’s original founder. During her father’s years at NU, she said, Democrats and Republicans naturally and routinely coexisted on campus.
Yuen said paintball outings, movie viewings and free political discourse were common among students of vastly different political viewpoints. This kind of relationship, she said, has since changed.
“The response to painting The Rock in support of the president-elect back when my dad was president simply would have been, ‘Well, you know, he won, and we should accept it,’” Yuen said, citing an instance last November in which conservative-identifying students painted The Rock with phrases in support of President Donald Trump and faced immediate backlash. “We should accept that his message is, quite literally, to make America great again, and it shouldn’t be something that we wage a metaphorical war over.”
Even within the sphere of conservative student activists on campus, however, students have varying attitudes toward Trump’s second term and the Republican Party in general.
“It’s crass. It’s low-class,” Casler-Bustamante said. “There’s no actual direction for the Republican Party. It’s just, ‘Whatever the left is doing right now is bad.’”
McCormick junior and NU’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom President Caleb Nunes, a Daily opinion contributor, said the execution of “certain policies” and the assigning of certain priorities has caused some disappointment surrounding Trump’s presidency in the club.
Nunes said that though no actions by the current Trump administration have convinced any members to wish they had voted for then-Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris, the president’s recent actions have tempered many members’ early excitement for his presidency.
“At the very beginning, I would say everyone was very excited. There was a lot of good energy and lots of optimism,” Nunes said. “That’s kind of subsided.”
Nunes said he was recently disappointed by Trump’s decisions to revoke student visas in response to protests and to circulate false information based on racial stereotypes to justify mass deportations. Noting that his views do not represent those of YAF and its members as a whole, Nunes said he found these actions to be “stupid things that reflect a high degree of incompetence.”
Despite some conservative activists’ misgivings about certain Trump policies, conservative-leaning groups on campus have faced their own share of controversy.
At a May 2 debate hosted by NU’s chapter of BridgeUSA — a national “multi-partisan student movement” with the goal of fostering civil political discourse — Nunes said the government cannot solve every problem using public policy, citing affirmative action as an example, arguing against the practice.
In his argument, Nunes referenced what he later described to The Daily as “mismatch theory” — the claim that Black students are “mismatched” into elite universities when they would fare better at lower-caliber schools, and as a result, underperform in comparison to their non-Black counterparts.
At the debate, Weinberg and SESP sophomore Juniper Shelley said Black students underperform overall because many face barriers as first-generation, low-income students. She said affirmative action policies help ensure “equal, not preferential, opportunities for advancement and inclusion.”
Nunes told The Daily that his remarks received a “hostile and shocking” audience response and a “big outcry” in a class after the debate, as students had reported Nunes’ comments to their professor.
“I did expect someone from the audience to write an inflammatory editorial in The Daily about it, although I guess no one was interested,” Nunes said. “Which I’m definitely glad about, because I don’t need any more controversy than already goes on in my life.”
NUCR’s leaders, however, view some level of controversy as necessary for their organization.
Several NUCR leaders told The Daily that controversy has long been inherent in the club’s events and that it helps them gain new members.
“It’s not like we have to seek out controversy; the controversy will come,” Weinberg junior and NUCR Vice President Clark Hanlon said. “It’s about dying on the right hills.”
The hills which Hanlon and other members of NUCR said they would be willing to die on include fighting for family values and Christian values. He said the group promotes these causes through guest speakers hosted on campus throughout the year.
In the past, NUCR’s speakers have included Dr. James Lindsay — who joined YAF and NUCR for an April 2023 lecture titled “The Dangers of Identity Politics and Intersectionality” — and anti-abortion activist Dr. Abby Johnson for a lecture titled “Challenge the Pro-‘Choice’ (Death) Narrative” on May 28.
YAF also promotes its views through guest speakers. Most recently, conservative writer and speaker Ian Haworth gave a guest lecture on hookup culture and casual sex — topics that both Nunes and NUCR leadership said they uphold as deeply important and relevant.
Both groups expressed a specific distaste for Sex Week, a weeklong program promoting sexual health and wellness planned in collaboration with Sexual Health and Assault Peer Educators, NU College Feminists, and the Center for Awareness, Response and Education.
Nunes criticized the Women’s Center for supporting Sex Week, claiming women “bear the largest cost of hyper-promiscuity and casual sex.”
“Men and women have very different libidos, different ways of treating sex, and you know, (women) are not really able to compartmentalize the action from the emotion in a way that men are able to do for evolutionary and psychological reasons,” Nunes said.
Casler-Bustamante said he finds the program’s “brash openness” to be vulgar, “immoral” and something “everyone should find sort of taboo.”
According to NUCR and YAF leaders, the groups will continue to chart the same course: hosting more of what Nunes called “conservative public intellectuals” for guest lectures and fostering open dialogue on political issues they care about, regardless of the controversy they may cause.
“I do not believe in shying away from controversy,” Nunes said. “However, I do think that there is a way to go about discussing these issues and a way to kind of package them … that isn’t just trying to get clicks or attention.”
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