John’s post regarding professors’ relative lack of influence over students’ political preferences is both interesting and counterintuitive (especially considering the overwhelmingly one-sided education students receive). It is also dramatically different from recent data regarding faith practices in the college years, where a recent study showed sharp — and enduring — decreases in spiritual activity. Why the difference? Two things come to mind.
First, much of college bias isn’t so much political (although it has obvious political ramifications) as cultural and moral. For example, colleges pay enormous attention to sexual issues — and not just at the political (same-sex marriage, etc.) level. Through programs like Wisconsin’s famous (infamous?) “Sex Out Loud,” universities deliver a message that is not necessarily political but can have a profound impact on personal behavior and individual world views.
Second, when it comes to cultural and moral issues, there is a strong element of peer influence to go along with the top-down influence of professors and administrators. As anyone who’s spent any time on campus knows (and many remember from their own college days), the university world is often marked by an unbridled hedonism that has no real parallel in post-college life. The binge drinking, sexual exhibitionism, and sexual promiscuity of even the supposedly cloistered Ivy Leagues exerts a powerful pull on students who are often young enough and physically strong enough to engage in various kinds of destructive behavior without suffering obvious consequences — aside from a few nagging hangovers and a few accusing consciences.
In reality, the twin pillars of the modern university are the cultural tyranny that we constantly decry on PBC but also a level of hedonism that we often ignore. Our conservative “big tent” includes both libertines and puritans, so there is certainly no conservative consensus that the “Girls Gone Wild” campus culture is even a problem. But for people of conservative or orthodox faith, it is of vital importance and may in fact drive more kids from their faith than hundreds of hours of leftist teaching in the classroom.