The Left Loses College Kids (LAT)

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-anderson28jan28,0,5967567.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

The Left Loses College Kids

By Brian C. Anderson

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.

The protests shocked the mainstream press, but to close observers of the American college scene, they came as no surprise. For decades, conservative critics have bemoaned academe's monolithically liberal culture. But the left's long dominion over the university — the last place on Earth that the left's power would break up, conservatives believed — is showing its first signs of weakening.

The change isn't coming from the faculty lounges and administrative offices but from self- organizing right-of-center students themselves. Never has the right flourished among college kids as it does today. The number of College Republicans, for instance, 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).