Under our current president, who came in in the late 80s, DePauw has been trying quite hard to shed its upper class white midwestern male and women who go there to get their Mrs. image. And it's worked. We're only 80% greek, instead of 98%, as we were 10 years ago, for one. We're still near the bottom for midwestern liberal arts colleges in terms of minority faculty and students, but we're improving compared to where we were 10 years ago. And we've become one of the best colleges in terms of administration policies for queers. True, we've produced our radicals in the past (the first Marxist historian in the US, Charles Beard, Barbara Kingsolver, and Vernon Jordan), but we were - until recently - the place where "Thetas come to meet Betas", the phrase attributed to Margreat Meade before she left, hating its environment. So I'd say we're working to shed our traditional conservative image (we're also trying to shed our drinking issue, but that's another topic I don't want to get into). Oxford has been the same way, but it's been a more gradual process.

I'm not sure what any institution could do to encourage conservative (or any other type) of voices. They should be there, of course, but I'm not sure how to go about it. I do think it's getting hard now, with attacks on classical liberalism (John Stewart Mill walks in) from both the left and right. I'm not sure how this trend can be stopped, but I won't let it change my adherence to a sense of the indivudial being free, but also a member of society - as well as a beleif in pluralism as the only honest way of looking at the world.