Of all the college towns fixed in the American mind as bastions of elite leftism, a Big Four stand out: Cambridge, Madison, Berkeley, and Boulder. It was no wonder, then, that the University of Colorado at Boulder received national attention, and raised many eyebrows, when it announced a couple of years back that it wanted to hire an identified conservative as a visiting faculty member — the beginning of a privately funded pilot program to bring conservative perspectives to its storied campus. I ended up being the guinea pig for this unorthodox experiment.
The University of Colorado at Boulder is probably no more liberal (and perhaps somewhat less so) than many of its peers, such as the University of Michigan, Ohio State, and UCLA. There are even a handful of excellent conservatives and libertarians scattered throughout its academic departments, though they still amount to well under 1 percent of the faculty. Colorado’s flagship university, like the University of California at Berkeley, suffers more from the reputation of its crunchy host town than from its own academic profile.
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