Another MA surprise: The power of the liberal campus

Of course Mr. Brown studied at Tufts 30 years ago, but even then it was starting to soar under the new leadership of the distinguished French-born nutritionist and World War II hero Jean Mayer, who had long been on record as favoring (according to his 1993 New York Times obituary):

a nationwide extension of food-assistance programs for the poor, a minimum annual income of $5,500 for a family of four, a national system for health and disability insurance, increased nutrition education, a 50 percent increase in Social Security benefits and mandatory enrichment of basic foods.

Whatever these convictions meant to Tufts students at the time, Brown hasn't been talking to the press about them. The rescue efforts of the National Guard during the Blizzard of 1978 made a much bigger impression on him.

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Mr. Brown is not the first conservative paladin from a liberal academy. Who knows where the movement would have gone if William F. Buckley, Jr. had been comfortable with his university's values in the early 1950s and never written God and Man at Yale. Exposures of Ivy League ways have since become initiation rites for such top-tier tories as John LeBoutillier (who still proudly lists Harvard Hates America on his Web site masthead), Dinesh D'Souza (a Dartmouth grad who once ran Princeton's dissident alumni magazine), Terry Eastland, and Ross Douthat.The last actually found not indoctrination but an even worse passive, careerist liberalism, of the kind that many left liberals have also deplored:

There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.

Imbalances are good for conservatives at liberal schools (and naturally vice versa) by pressuring them to support their values. And the tendency of even those who excel in the humanities, likeChief Justice John Roberts, a Harvard summa and serial prizewinner in history, to choose the J.D. over the Ph.D., means that a larger proportion of conservative talent is channeled into positions of real political and economic power as opposed to doubtful influence.