"Conservative” freshmen: the Fox generation

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In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: 40 Years of Changes in the Student Body:

For four decades, the University of California at Los Angeles has administered the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshmen Survey, recording the values, attitudes and backgrounds of the high school graduates who will become the next batch of American college students. … Today, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute is releasing a broad overview of trends gleaned from the survey. The report, “The American Freshman: Forty-Year Trends 1966–2006,” highlights some striking changes in the makeup of college freshman classes, many of which confirm widely reported trends — but not without a few surprising findings.

Among the trends reported:

Students are becoming more polarized. Moderates are in decline, and more are labeling themselves as either liberal or conservative. Another interesting finding (which might surprise David Horowitz) concerns campus speakers’ freedom to express themselves: “Over half (55.1 percent) of conservative (and far right) students believe that colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers compared to only 28.5 percent of liberal (and far left) students. Thus, not only may some polarizing issues divide students, but the method by which they engage each other in dialogue concerning these issues may also be a point of disagreement.”