Of all the college towns fixed in the American mind as bastions of elite leftism,
a Big Four stand out: Cambridge, Madison, Berkeley, and Boulder. It was no wonder,
then, that the University of Colorado at Boulder received national attention, and
raised many eyebrows, when it announced a couple of years back that it wanted to hire
an identified conservative as a visiting faculty member — the beginning of a privately
funded pilot program to bring conservative perspectives to its storied campus. I ended
up being the guinea pig for this unorthodox experiment.
The University of Colorado at Boulder is probably no more liberal (and perhaps somewhat
less so) than many of its peers, such as the University of Michigan, Ohio State, and
UCLA. There are even a handful of excellent conservatives and libertarians scattered
throughout its academic departments, though they still amount to well under 1 percent
of the faculty. Colorado’s flagship university, like the University of California
at Berkeley, suffers more from the reputation of its crunchy host town than from its
own academic profile. Read more.