The intellectual benefit of being a Campus Conservative

My name is Willem Hart and I am a conservative. People like me are not so common at a place like York, a university with a particularly strong Marxist ideological orientation in student leadership and the liberal arts.
But we’re here. We’re in your lectures and tutorials. We’re around, and while we might not always vocally express our views, for the obvious fear of a grade reprisal from
dissenting academic authority figures, we’re still thinking, processing the coursework with our viewpoints and our own biases, just like everyone else.
Being right-wing on campus is highly enjoyable on an intellectual level. In a class where the professor or TA is predictably left-wing, I get to quietly imbibe the information, pick apart it’s prescribed framework, and critique it from my point of view. My pre-conceived ideas go challenged and I engage in the thrill of bolstering them over and over again, strengthening them each time.
To me, this is what an education is supposed to be.                
But I pity the unflinchingly left-wing students who come to York and assimilate into their ideological echo-chamber. I pity their left-wing privilege of always having professors that they’ll nominally agree with, never being challenged to leave their comfort zone, never having to use facts and logic, rather only emotion and cherry-picked statistics to defend their arguments.
They won’t know the pleasure of having their points challenged, having to think about them outside of class, and exploring the possible limitations of their pre-conceived ideas. But myself and others like me, on the other hand, will enjoy the academic exercise of arguing against such scrutiny, strengthening and refining our ideas and arguments after every clash.
My favourite course that I’ve taken, the academic setting in which I can firmly say that I have developed the most academically, was a social theory course called Radical Ideas and Ideologies in the Modern Age: Community, Alienation, and Revolution. It was a seminar lead by an avowed Marxist, a Luddite, who alongside me, enjoyed the challenge of opposing each other in class discussions.
With the skills to absorb the information and still grid it through my own personal political leanings, I was able to take away a truly enjoyable intellectual classroom experience.
As my undergraduate years come to an end, I notice a disturbing trend among a fair amount of so called “progressives” in the liberal arts. Many are leaving school without any intellectual assets aside from the ability to regurgitate critical sociological theory. The York social justice echo chamber has failed to provide an authentic, critical way of thinking to the very students who profess to desire it. The irony.
After an undergraduate experience of learning in a way that goes against the Marxist grain, I have improved my thinking and the content of my ideas. I wager that when it comes to critical thinking in the future, I will possess the upper hand over my dogmatically left-wing peers.
Willem Hart
President, Campus Conservatives York University