)

Right side up: With their ranks swelling on college campuses, young conservatives say they are revolutionaries fighting a liberal establishment. They're meeting in D.C. this week to promote the cause. (Beth Gillin, Jul. 23, 2003, Philadelphia Inquirer)

While College Democrats of America has disappeared altogether from 20 states, its chapters dwindling from 500 in 1992 to fewer than 300 now, the College Republican National Committee has 1,148 campus chapters, and its membership has tripled since 1999. [...]

Studies have shown that campus conservatives are increasingly female and middle class. They admire Ronald Reagan and are more patriotic since 9/11.

They oppose speech codes, set-aside student government seats for racial minorities, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender groups, and what they see as political correctness.

Increasingly, they are for school prayer and the public funding of church groups and against abortion, a recent study by University of California Berkeley and University of Alabama professors found.

More of them are hawks than doves, the Harvard University Institute of Politics reported in May, noting that support for the war in Iraq outpaces opposition 66 percent to 30 percent. The Harvard study also found that 61 percent of college students like the way President Bush is doing his job.

They aren't into casual sex, according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, which has been surveying incoming freshmen since 1966. Only 42 percent of freshman approve of it, down from 51 percent in 1987.

It's an interesting question, just what a generation of young people raised under three or four pro-free market presidents in a row will end up looking like politically. When is the last time a person under 32 would have heard a responsible public figure offer a robust defense of statism? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2003 7:56 AM