St. Lawrence University is a place where people from all different walks of life come together for a multitude of reason. For some of us it’s sports; for others it’s the bustling Saturday nights, or the awesome academics. But most commonly people go away to school, especially a place like St. Lawrence to be exposed to a wide variety of opinions and new experiences.
St. Lawrence does have clubs and organizations that represent a wide variety beliefs and ideologies. However, one thing is clearly missing and has been missing ever since the onset of the 2016 General Election. That thing is SLU Republicans.
The decline of SLU Republicans was outlined in a may 2016 Hill News article written by Daniel Banta. Since I wasn’t personally on campus during this period where both SLU Republicans and SLU Democrats existed, I feel like its important to reference literature from campus sources during that period.
A 2016 article by Banta noted, “Liberal ideas are increasingly resonating more with the current generation of college students, a fact which is changing the for- tunes of political clubs at St. Lawrence University.”
This statement still holds true today. A majority of students at St. Lawrence lean to the left of the center.
According to Niche Polls regarding the political climate on campus, 34 percent of students identify as moderate, 41 percent fall into the left leaning liberal/extremely liberal camp and only 11 percent fall into the conservative/extremely conservative camps (the remaining 14 percent fall in “unknown category”).
These numbers clearly show that there is a considerable liberal majority on campus, which is where you can begin to see why SLU Democrats has such a large membership and why SLU Republicans no longer exists.
Now the question may be “why does it matter” that SLU Republicans does not exist if there is clearly a small amount of conservatives on campus, and it’s fair to ask that question. However, in my opinion, the non-existence of a conservative place to voice opinions will only increase the political polarization that plagues both our nation and our small upstate campus.
In order to have an all-encompassing campus climate it’s, important that people both allow and encourage both sides to have some forum to share and discuss ideas.
Without a concrete forum for discussion of both ideologies, demographics will be- come isolated and potentially become radicalized: something everyone at St. Lawrence should want to avoid.
SLU Republicans should not have to align with our ideas for us to want it to exist. Even seeing it as being the “fair” and “right” thing to do shouldn’t warrant its existence. But the desire to have a campus without iso- lated extreme ideals certainly should.