The Appeal of the Campus Right

By Julia Steinberg

Thursday, October 23, 2025

 

College campuses today have a reputation for being hostile to right-leaning students. As a recent graduate who became a conservative in college, I can’t say I entirely agree. Yes, we’re outnumbered, and yes, our ideas often get disregarded. Being a conservative might be socially disadvantageous. But if you want to know where the real political energy is on campuses, it’s on the right.

 

The recent killing of Charlie Kirk, and the flood of interest in his organization, Turning Point USA, has drawn attention to college students’ appetite for conservative ideas. I was not particularly inspired by Kirk in my personal ideological transformation as a student at Stanford University; Turning Point didn’t have much of a presence on campus while I was there. But one principle he stood for—the celebration of debate, of a marketplace of ideas—is what first appealed to me about the right.

 

I arrived at Stanford in the fall of 2021 as a progressive from Los Angeles, where most of my peers and I had thought of conservatives as, essentially, evil. At a club fair, I signed up for the Stanford Young Democratic Socialists of America, as well as the leftist magazine, The Stanford Sphere. I hoped to live in one of Stanford’s co-op houses, communal living spaces largely focused on left-leaning activism.

 

As the school year got under way, however, I began to notice something that grated on me. Debates in the classroom, whether about socialism or Plato or the Quran, felt highly delicate, as if everyone was afraid of offending everyone else. Rather than “I disagree with so-and-so,” it was more socially acceptable to say “piggybacking on so-and-so’s point,” even if there was a disagreement. When I finally found someone willing to have an extended intellectual debate with me—my problem-set partner for a logic course—I was interested to learn that he was a staff writer at the Stanford Review, the conservative publication on campus. He invited me to a meeting during winter quarter, and, mostly out of curiosity, I decided to attend.

 

What I saw there was the opposite of what I’d found in my classes: Students were encouraged to disagree with one another. At each meeting, students had to present—and defend—the articles they were working on; then the group would debate three topics, such as how the U.S. should respond to the war in Ukraine and whether Silicon Valley’s relevance was waning. I kept going back to Review meetings, but I didn’t tell many of my friends—I didn’t want to be judged. Because of COVID restrictions, clubs at Stanford could meet in person only if they gathered outside. Each Monday night, I bundled up in thermal tights, gloves, and a heavy coat and slipped out of my dorm room.

 

When I pitched my first article for the Review—an essay arguing, partly based on my own experience, that COVID restrictions were shifting Stanford students to the right—I got helpful pushback on the idea from my peers at the publication. How could COVID, rather than administrative bloat or the unrest in the summer of 2020, be the causal mechanism? And were Stanford students even moving to the right? I went ahead with the article, and found, as I wrote, that the give-and-take during my presentation had prepared me to anticipate and address opposing arguments. I joined the staff of the Review during my freshman spring, started identifying as a conservative as a sophomore, and served as editor in chief of the publication during my senior year.

 

I am hardly the first person to change his or her political views in college. I’m also hardly the first person to find conservatism on Stanford’s campus. The Stanford Review was founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel and Norman Book, both undergraduates at the time, as part of a larger movement that opposed the removal of a required “Western Culture” course from the curriculum. Many of my Review friends shared a similar trajectory to mine: They came into college as liberals and, seeking a place for debate, turned to conservative spaces on campus. Then they were persuaded by the conservative ideas themselves.

 

Or some subset of those ideas. What outsiders might not understand is that, at least in my experience, the appeal of conservatism on campus today isn’t really about Donald Trump or Trumpism, or any other set of ideological beliefs. At the level of national politics, the GOP is full of Trump loyalists who refuse to break from the party line (even as some of Trump’s prominent followers outside government have broken with him on certain issues). But at Stanford, the conservative culture was full of diversity and contradiction. The Review staff included MAGA diehards, traditional Catholics, anti-Trump neoconservatives, isolationists, anti-identity-politics liberals, Luddites, and (in my case) techno-capitalists, all challenging one another’s ideas. Some of us voted for Trump; some of us did not. Still, most of us were excited when he won; there were two well-attended pro-Trump Election Night watch parties at Stanford. Since January 20, however, reactions have been mixed. Intellectually, Trump is far from the focal point of the conservative movement at Stanford.

 

What’s driving it instead is a hunger for discourse. Throughout my senior year, I had coffee with students interested in writing for the Review. I would ask, “Why are you a conservative?” or, at the very least, “Why are you interested in writing for a conservative publication?” A few mentioned the riots that had destabilized American cities in 2020. Several mentioned COVID lockdowns and having to do school online. They told me about cancel culture among their peers. Underlying all this was a sense that the progressivism crowding the halls of their high schools was stifling. In that environment, questioning ideas seemed dangerous—and alluring. Preachy, judgmental authority has never sat well with young people. The young people of today see that authority in the establishment left, not the right.

 

At Stanford, this translated to a vibrant conservative scene and a lackluster liberal one. In my time there, the leftist magazine I had wanted to join as a freshman went defunct. (A new version, The Stanford Philistine, emerged, but its articles are anonymous and the last one was published in February.) Earlier this year, the school announced that two of the co-ops would be partially converted into regular housing because of lack of student interest. Meanwhile, many Review meetings during my tenure ran out of chairs. So did meetings of the underground conservative debate society. The David Network conference in Washington, D.C., which targets conservatives at elite colleges, drew 142 Stanford students in 2025 (and more than 900 total attendees); two years earlier, only about 60 students from Stanford had attended.

 

Stanford overall is still very liberal: 96 percent of political donations from Stanford-affiliated individuals in the 2024 election cycle went to Democrats, according to a Stanford Daily analysis of OpenSecrets data. The university doesn’t publish data about its students’ political leanings. But the Marriage Pact, a questionnaire-based matchmaking service started in 2017 by two Stanford students, asked more than 4,700 students about their politics last year. The group’s numbers showed that freshman males were the most conservative group on campus; women were more liberal than men, but freshman females were more conservative than other women.

 

This tracks with trends across the country. Younger members of Gen Z are more conservative than older Gen Zs, and voters ages 18 to 29 drifted toward Trump in the election last year. At least anecdotally, other elite colleges are seeing new signs of conservatism on campus. The Harvard Salient, a conservative journal, went defunct in 2012 but was revived in 2021. A friend of mine in Yale’s Conservative Party told me that last year’s freshman cohort had 20 students, compared with the usual five to 10. (The group itself wouldn’t confirm those numbers to me but said that the party had seen a “decent uptick in interest and involvement” over the past few years.)

 

Since this school year started, I’ve heard from Review staffers about how eager many freshmen are to join the publication and debate ideas. The first Review meeting was standing-room only. I expect that the Review will need a larger space soon. As a new generation of young conservatives has gone through college, we’ve realized that being forced to defend our ideas makes them stronger. For now, the marketplace of ideas has been abandoned by the left and turned into a thriving black market on the right. And the thing about black markets is that they are very difficult to shut down.