The Harvard Crimson, a newspaper I once served as the president of (and still serve as a graduate council member of), has an editorial encouraging conservatives such as Mitt Romney, Bill O'Reilly, and Ted Cruz who might later criticize the university not to attend in the first place. (By this logic, instead of writing God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr. should never have matriculated.)
When someone sent the editorial to me I thought it was a joke, but the current Crimson president is apparently going on television defending it.
As a veteran of a college newspaper and even some non-college publications, I know that it's basically impossible to prevent the occasional ill-considered piece from creeping in, but even allowing for that, on the face of it there seem to be some flaws with the argument of the editorial. First of all, one's politics at the time one makes the decision on where to go to college may not be the same as one's politics ten or 20 years after graduation, so as a practical matter, the editorial's advice is not particularly useful. Second, the editorial discouragement as stated seems to apply only to conservatives (if one counts Mr. Romney and Mr. O'Reilly in that group), and not to, say, all the radicals who criticize Harvard after graduation as just an establishment dedicated to perpetuating the hegemony of the ruling class and flawed because of its insufficient mental health services, its failure to immediate divest its endowment from all fossil-fuel related holdings, etc.. Third, the editorial perfectly captures a not particularly attractive strain of Harvard smugness — the biggest offense one can imagine there is not the actual substance of any position held by a conservative or anyone else, but the possibility that anyone might dare suggest that Harvard is anything less than the world's greatest university. And fourth, no one seems to consider the idea that by discouraging the enrollment of conservatives, the editorialists would be depriving the other students of the benefit of intellectual diversity, that is, the back and forth over ideas and the opportunity to have your own notions challenged.
