College recruiting practices have something to do with it... I see more 'career oriented' students showing up @ UCSC and less liberal artist energy. That is an absolutely stated intention of this particular campus. More computer engineering.... and genetics. Less fine art, music... writing.
The students still tend to be 'liberals without a clue' to progressive, and I don't know how kids from more conservative backgrounds, or conservative schools are acting out, but I know that many of those at UCSC are only marginally politically or socially motivated. For instance, I tried to point out to one of the students who works with me that her future work in 'environmental reporting', which she sees as some form of environmentalism, isn't going to be what she thought it was unless the society she lives in changes dramatically and there's work beyond being a PR flack for a timber company... and she needs to get 'on the stick' if she wants that 'dream job' working for a world renowned environmental journal seing that right now her career options would be somewhat limited to freelancing her work to a small number of magazines with even more limited budgets for writers... or a 'marine sciences major who thought that would be a groovy thing to do, spend your days at the beach doing grad work... only to find that the only employers with the salary that will pay your student loans are the oilcos, and the USGS. The students I interact with seem to know this subconsciously, and as far as I can tell, see no option in their immediate future, so they buy into it, and some form of 'conservatism' takes root, perhaps to preserve what they think they CAN achieve if society will at least 'hold still' for them long enough to accomplish their 'dream'... which of course revolves around... accumulating stuff. I don't really know if I'd call that 'right wing', unless scrambling for the best 'me first' position in a society offering rapidly diminishing opportunities for young people is 'right wing', but then, I am speaking of Santa Cruz California, not Benton Harbor Michigan. Leigh On 4/6/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 4/6/07, ken hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So what is the explanation for the rise of right wing > thought on campuses. If College Republicans are scoring more recruits even now, that's probably not because young people have gotten more Republican but because they have funders that help them recruit more even out of a shrinking pool of the hard Right among the young, it seems to me. Both the organized Right and the organized Left are minuscule on US college campuses today, and the dominant campus mood, especially at places like the Ohio State University, is apolitical, focused on balancing academic work and wage labor (of which students need to do more, in order to pay for tuition and other fees that have been rising much faster than general inflation), to the exclusion of politics. -- Yoshie
