On Saturday, libertarian students from the Ivy League schools gathered at Columbia to attend a set of lectures, with the subject of dialogue being individual freedom. Jamie Maarten, the CU Libertarians President, described it as “the Students for Liberty, which is an independent organization. Basically, it’s a conference to get student groups that are liberty-minded together.”

With over one hundred fifty libertarians occupying Lerner Hall, it was a rare opportunity to see a political minority challenge the liberal Columbia community.

“There are arguments, especially right now with health care and the war we have a lot of really strong opinions, so it’s sometimes a little rough, but for the most part people are pretty accepting.”

Though students on campus may tolerate other political views, it seems that the diversity that defines Columbia does not extend into the academic realm. In a recent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Professor Mark Lilla criticized the lack of conservative thought in the university curriculums, writing that if “conservatism is to be treated simply as an ideological pathology…and that the only representatives of conservatism that we know today are hosts on Fox News, that means that students on the one hand have a truncated view of our intellectual tradition as it touches on politics.”

“You’re seeing that passing of a particular generation in university faculties. They came of age in the 60s and 70s…that generation has its own particular history and its own particular view of the university.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Nigel Ashford from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University argued that “You do get a culture of ideas that wants to delegitimize ideas that challenge them. So whereas academia should be a place for new ideas…we’ve increasingly created a situation where academic departments, what they do is they simply appoint people who have the same ideas as themselves.”

This stagnation is problematic because professors don’t just shape their students’ education but also their beliefs. As Dr. Ashford claims, “intellectuals have enormous power.”

“What I want to do is professors, whatever their views are, is to present students with a variety of perspectives and the students have to work out for themselves what they think is the right answer.”

Professor Lilla has similar intentions: “You want to make sure that all the ideas you need to think about as a young person are being articulated somewhere on campus.”