An accredited course on conservatism at the University of Virginia debuting this fall could set a trend on campuses across the country, organizers say.
The 11-week course, referred to as Conservatism 101, aims to inform students of all political persuasions about the figures and thinkers who have built modern conservatism and to dispel stereotypes. Unlike many courses, it will be taught by several lecturers over the course of the fall semester to give students a host of different perspectives.
Topics include whether or not the Founding Fathers were liberal or conservative, libertarian philosophy, and Ronald Reagan, among others. It has proven so popular that a second section of the class might be needed.
“It’s a perspective people need to hear that really gets left out,” said Wes Siler, a former leader of the university’s Burke Society, the campus conservative group responsible for enacting the course.
Courses on conservatism have been held at other universities, such as American University in Washington, D.C. and George Mason University in Virginia, but they have never been proposed as a template for courses at other academic institutions.
Siler hopes to get at least 20 similar classes started at colleges and universities across the country and has been talking with professors around the country with an interest in teaching the course at their university. He has his sights set on large state-affiliated schools such as the University of Texas and plans to get at least one course on conservatism at a school in each of the 50 states.
The overwhelming left-wing bias on campuses such as the University of Virginia makes courses such as this necessary because it offers the only chance many students will have to hear an alternate perspective, Craig Shirley, a noted Reagan biographer and course lecturer, said.
Shirley will be one of several lecturers who will help teach the conservatism course at the University of Virginia. He plans to teach from his book “Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan And The Campaign That Changed America” and emphasize the role the Reagan played in shaping modern American conservatism.
“There are many different arguments out there,” Shirley said. “My compliments to UVA for deciding to move ahead with this because hopefully it will start a trend on other college campuses and universities … to open things up to something other than just a sort of parochial liberalism.”
Shirley contends left-wing political bias on college campuses do not present as much of a problem as the political censorship found at many schools. This same sort of political censorship and bias almost killed the course at the University of Virginia before it could even get off the ground.
Siler and his Burke Society faced an uphill fight getting the course approved by the university through its student-initiated course program. The program allows University of Virginia students to build their own classes if they work together with a professor.
Siler said he developed the idea for the Conservatism 101 class while he was sitting around with a group of friends who would privately gather to discuss their favorite conservative thinkers in addition to their course studies.
“So [I thought] why not just bring it into the classroom and use this program to do it,” Siler said. “So that was our idea, and [we] felt like we had a lot of legitimacy to do that because there was already a course at our university, there was already a class called ‘Modern Liberalism and Its Critics.’
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