A Princeton University senior sounded off on "The Ingraham Angle" in response to his op-ed in The New York Times saying college campuses lurching leftward have counterintuitively pushed students to the right.
Host Laura Ingraham asked Adam Hoffman about the firestorm his column created, which included a retort from a writer claiming his description of college campuses has "straight-up never been true."
"Is there real free thought and free expression left at Princeton?" she asked.
"I wrote this piece precisely because I don't think so. I disagree with that writer," Hoffman said.
"I'm a senior now, and through my four years, I've served in leadership for a number of conservative organizations on-campus, from College Republicans to the Princeton Tory, our conservative journal, and I've observed this trend that I identified in the article where apolitical students are becoming politicized and moved to the right."
Students who arrive at Princeton's campus already ideologically center-right or conservative, by extension, become even more so, he added.
"This is a trend that I've seen accelerate just in the past year-and-a-half."
Ingraham said that following the Carter administration, a "new generation of young Reaganites" formed on Princeton's campus to rebut the extreme progressivism of the 1970s.
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"That's when I was in college, and I wondered whether this would ultimately happen on the college campuses in this country, because when you go so far left — shut down so much speech, play this game of micro-aggressions — first of all, it's no fun," she said.
"They are the most puritanical, and I'm glad you use that word — ‘puritanical.'"
Hoffman agreed, saying the 20th Century campus simply "skewed liberal," and that conservatives were able to speak their opinion and be "shut down" afterward — rather than the paradigm of centrist and conservative speech being canceled and censored before the fact.
"There's not just a liberal bias, but I think conservatives are being excluded," he said. "You can't even voice that opinion. You're shut down before you even utter an argument."
"Conservatives can't get funding for the events on campus like progressive students… can. I think this is just part of a broader trend that we're seeing on the left, and it is leaving effects on the right."
In his Times column, Hoffman said contemporary collegiate conservatives are less moderate and complacent than past classes, and instead skew toward "scorched-earth politics" because of the "puritanically progressive campuses" that "alienate" such students.
"The American universities that once served as moderating finishing schools have become breeding grounds for conservative firebrands," he wrote in the op-ed.
