Throughout 2003 and into 2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids were agitating against war in Iraq, right? Well, no. Students at UCLA, Michigan and many other schools were sponsoring bake sales to protest . . . affirmative action. For white students and faculty, a cookie cost (depending on the school) $1; blacks and Hispanics could buy one for a lot less.

The principle, the protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits....

...But the left's long dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite gatekeepers....

...The number of College Republicans has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats' 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). College Republicans are thriving even on elite campuses. "We've doubled in size over the last few years, to more than 400 students," reports Evan Baehr, the square-jawed future pol heading the Princeton chapter. The number of College Republicans at Penn has also rocketed upward, says chapter president Stephanie Steward, from 25 or so members a couple of years ago to 700 today. Same story at Harvard. These young Republican activists, trudging into battleground states this fall in get-out-the-vote efforts, helped George W. Bush win....

...Yet for most of the conservative students I interviewed, traditional values did not extend to homosexuality. Though few support gay marriage, fewer still want the Constitution amended to ban it, and most are OK with state-sanctioned civil unions for gays. "I don't buy the prevalent argument that recognizing gay unions would undermine the institution of marriage," says Vanderbilt sophomore Anne Malinee, the strongly pro-life editor of the Vanderbilt Torch, the school's conservative monthly. "Of all the issues elected officials could be focusing on, why this?" Similarly, Bucknell history and economics major Charles Mitchell, culturally conservative in many respects, isn't worried about gay marriage. "I believe that homosexuality is a sin, because that's what the Bible says, but I also believe that if two people of the same sex love each other and can get a priest to marry them, the propriety of that is none of the state's business...."

posted by Tom at 6:51:00 AM