Special report: opinion on the campus - Back to School: Dumb and Dumber - Cover Story

National Review, Sept 25, 1995

THE college survey reported on in the following pages is the first installment of a project undertaken for the Educational Reviewer. The design is to track the development of students' political and religious attitudes. Last term we asked freshmen at 12 colleges and universities to reply to our questionnaire, which we will send again to the Class of '98 when it reaches senior year.

We begin then with first-year students at: The Citadel, in Charleston, S.C., a military school with now and again one female cadet; Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va.; the University of Indiana at Bloomington; Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis. the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.; the University of California at Los Angeles; the University of California at Irvine; and three members of the Ivy League: Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth.

The colleges are listed in roughly ideological order, from most conservative to most liberal, except that Brown is almost everywhere ahead of, that is to say behind, Dartmouth in ideological rectitude. The full results follow, on pp. 71-78; here are some highlights.

Home and School: Most of our 2,700 freshman respondents went to public high schools (Question 2). Stanford and the Ivies have the highest percentage of students who prepared at private schools (ranging from 30% to 35%) .... At 10 of the 12 colleges, more than 60% of respondents come from households with combined annual income of over $50,000 (Question 3). (The exceptions are Liberty and UC Irvine.)

Duties and Rights: There is heavy backing for tax-supported college financial assistance (Question 11). Only Liberty (52%) and Yale (66%) dip below 70% in favor .... Only at The Citadel, Liberty, and Marquette do the majority favor Strategic Defense research and development (Question 12). . . . Ten campuses provided big majorities in favor of government price controls on health costs (Question 13). And even Liberty and The Citadel had sizable percentages (37%) in favor .... There were surprisingly substantial majorities at many of the liberal campuses for diminishing the federal social-welfare system (Question 14).... Heavy majorities at ten colleges opposed ending federal aid for the arts. The two defectors were Liberty and The Citadel (Question 17). ... Seven of the colleges were split on ending government-enforced affirmative action (Question 18). Liberty and The Citadel had bare majorities in favor of ending it; Brown and U. Wisconsin had bare majorities opposed. That left only Marquette boldly favoring (64%) an end to such programs.

Liberty and Order: At ten campuses more than 30% favored legalizing marijuana (Question 19). At only three (Liberty, UC Irvine, Indiana) is there heavy opposition .... Only three colleges (the Ivies) favored prohibiting the death penalty (Question 23) .... At eight colleges, majorities would give legal standing to homosexual "marriage" (Question 24) .... At Yale 100% would not permit the exclusion of homosexuals from positions where they would be primarily responsible for guiding children (Question 26). . . . Only Yale had a majority (51%) in favor of preferential consideration for designated minorities in college admissions (Question 28).

Faith and Morals: On the matter of formal religious affiliation (Question 32) there were higher percentages each for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism than for "None" everywhere except UCLA and Brown. There were surprisingly high percentages for "Other," but from remarks jotted down on several questionnaires, it appears that these do not represent high concentrations of Zoroastrians or Jehovah's Witnesses: members of many Christian denominations which outsiders might consider "Protestant"--Free Baptists, Old Methodists, Church of Christ--declined so to list themselves. Judaism is the only other category with double-digit percentages, at five of the schools .... By majorities greater than two-thirds the freshmen at each college believe in immortality (Question 83). Percentages not believing ranged from 5 (Liberty) to 27 (Brown) .... Those attending religious services at least once a week (Question 36) were in double digits at all the schools, with the numbers ranging from 15% (Yale) to 85% (Liberty). Five schools, however--the Ivies, plus U. Michigan and U. Wisconsin--had double digits in the "Not at all" category .... At no college did fewer than 37% say they prayed to God outside of religious services at least several times a week (Question 37). However, the percentage overall that never prayed outside of religious services was even higher than the percentage that never attended religious services .... The freshmen were asked whether they would approve, e.g., extramarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, a) without taking religious precepts into account, and b) taking them into account (.Question 38). For most of these behaviors, the number who said they approved even taking religious precepts into account was far higher than the students' religious affiliation as stated in Question 32 would have suggested... ;. Asked for their view of "the person of Christ (Question 39), majorities at six schools (ranging from 52% at U. Wisconsin to 92% at Liberty) chose "Christ is divine.' Only at UCLA and Brown did less than 30% hold this view Only at Brown, meanwhile, did more than 10% believe that "Christ may never have lived at all."