The University of Wisconsin's Thompson Center gives conservatism a voice on campus

In an era where truly unbelievable poll results are released every week, one result stands as one of the most surprising. In a Pew Research poll released in July of last year, 58% of Republicans said they believed American universities actually have a negative impact on the U.S.  As recently as 2010, only 32% of Republicans thought colleges did more harm than good — but that number has spiked sharply since 2015.

Campus leadership has noticed. In a recent survey released by Inside Higher Ed, 86% of university presidents said perceived liberal bias on campus was responsible for declining public support for universities.

The idea that college campuses are breeding grounds for liberalism has been around for a century. An article from the Milwaukee Sentinel in March of 1916 reports it has been “long known…that certain radical politicians have not been averse to bringing the university into politics.”

But the stratospheric rise in conservative opposition to higher education in the past few years has challenged university administrators and lawmakers to fix the ideological imbalance. Last year, some Wisconsin lawmakers even suggested withholding funds from the state university system unless ideological diversity on campus was more present. One Iowa lawmaker introduced a bill requiring state universities to take political affiliation into account when hiring new professors and giving preferential treatment to conservatives.

But campus speech isn’t a zero-sum proposition; simply limiting progressivism by policing the number of liberal speakers and professors on campus doesn’t leave anyone better off. The more reasonable alternative is to make efforts to bring new conservative voices to traditionally liberal campuses and provide them with support.

That is the goal of the recently unveiled Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership on the UW-Madison campus. The center, first announced in May of 2017, was funded with $3 million in the past state budget and aims to provide the university with balanced scholarship.

“In any dialogue, there has to be multiple sides,” Thompson Center director Ryan Owens told me. Owens said the center was “firmly committed” to “reaching across the aisle to make sure all sides of an issue are discussed.”

“At the end of the day, everybody benefits when there’s a good airing of all sides,” Owens said. “Universities are better off in the long run when people see them as fair and objective.”

Of course, the mere presence of conservatism on campus is enough to send liberals, who have owned the university for decades, over the edge. Democratic Madison-area state Rep. Chris Taylor ripped the Thompson Center as a “a partisan, conservative think tank,” complaining that the center accepted funds from the right-leaning Bradley Foundation to help subsidize speakers on campus. Other faculty have complained that the center’s governing board is made up primarily of Republican politicians who also happen to be white and male.

But such criticisms elide the fact that the UW-Madison has long hosted devoted progressive organizations such as the Center on Wisconsin Strategies (COWS) and the Institute for Research on Poverty. A few years ago, legislative Republicans even tried to evict the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism from campus, a move that was ultimately vetoed by Gov. Scott Walker.

But the Thompson Center’s goal isn’t to be a conservative safe space, it is simply to ensure that some conservative voices are heard on campus.

“To the extent that we’re going to go and reach out to both sides of the aisle, it’s going to look as though there are more Republicans than there have been before, because there are probably going to be more Republicans than there have been before,” said Owens. “That’s not because we’re benefiting the Republicans, or trying to sort of ‘weight’ them disproportionately, it’s simply because we’re trying to get average equality across different speakers and groups and the like.”

Some conservatives argues for bailing out on large public institutions and retreating to conservative private institutions such as Hillsdale College in Michigan, a liberal arts campus adorned by bronze statues of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

But instead of replicating the Hillsdale model, conservatives should focus on more representation in large public universities. That’s exactly what the Thompson Center offers — adding ideological diversity without subtracting opposing viewpoints.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email christian.schneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM