Before the start of the Fall 2015 semester, then-incoming Lang freshman Kirill Clark posted on the New School Class of 2019 Facebook group proposing a club solely for Republicans at his new school. This may have been a pretty much standard sight in freshman Facebook groups for colleges across the country, but at The New School, where there had never before in its politically active history been a student group devoted to conservative politics, his post garnished a lot attention.
“There was actually a lot of negative backlash, initially,” Clark said. “Some people wrote things like ‘We burn Republicans.’ Really kind of funny things, but at the same time demonstrative of the liberal attitude of the school. In a way it’s just joking, but at the same time, it’s also like, ‘We don’t accept your views at all.'”
The post quickly gathered more than 120 comments, most of them discussions and arguments with threads of back-and-forth replies. Comments varied from incredulous to aggressive to sarcastic memes, with a handful of defenses for Clark’s proposal peppered throughout.
Although a 120-comment Facebook feud about an idea would signal a daunting task to most, the initial reactions he faced from his fellow students, even in the summer before starting school, didn’t lead Clark to second-guess starting the group.
“At The New School there has always been a tradition of dissenting viewpoints, so I was thinking that there would definitely be people who are interested in joining such a club,” he said. “I definitely knew there would be some sort of backlash just because of the history of the school, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to worry about that when these are legitimate viewpoints that I hold and I know other people hold as well.”
A semester-and-a-half later, Clark’s idea became a reality when The New School College Republicans held their first meeting in March. The new group — an officially recognized chapter of the New York Federation of College Republicans — is the first Republican or conservative political student group to organize within The New School, according to the director of the Office of Student Development and Activities. Starting out with 12 members, the group faces a future without much precedent, within an environment, as various members noted, that is challenging, and even hostile, toward conservative politics. Although they quickly recruited a handful of passionate members, it remains to be seen whether the backlash elicited by Clark’s original Facebook post foreshadows any kind of backlash on campus.
Clark, a Philosophy major at Lang and the group’s president, hopes that the arrival of a conservative group on campus will instigate healthy political discussions. Despite the wide range of political activism groups currently organizing around campus, Clark believes that none of them address his politics. “Most of the groups, if not all of the groups, within the social justice sphere that exist at The New School would definitely be advocating for specific sections of the Democratic agenda,” he said.
Peyton Sumner, the group’s vice president and a Parsons sophomore majoring in Strategic Design and Management, said that starting the group fulfilled something that he felt the school was missing.
“I feel that a conservative voice is something that The New School lacks a lot of. I’m always really willing to hear everybody’s points of view, and I feel like that’s necessary and something we needed at The New School,” he said. “People fear what they don’t understand. And I feel like a lot of people here think that, ‘oh, Republicans are so terrible.’ But they don’t actually know because they’ve never been around most Republicans. They’ve only seen what they see on TV, like Donald Trump — people that do not represent most people’s opinions.”
Sumner assumed that the initial recruitment process would not be easy, but he and Clark quickly found a few like-minded peers. “I feel like a lot of people are hiding what they actually feel, because they’re scared to speak out a lot of the times. And that was something we found in the [first] meeting that most people had a common feeling towards,” Sumner said.
At the first meeting, club members noted that the conservative ideologies represented in the group are diverse. Angela Landry, a member of the group and a freshman at The New School for Public Engagement majoring in Media Studies and Film, said, “We’re all very much politically active and aware, but some of us are very radical, and some of us are kind of towards the middle.”
If there was one thing that they did seem to agree upon, it was their wariness about their party’s current situation in the ongoing presidential race.
“I don’t like Trump as much as I hoped I would,” Landry said. “Earlier this past year I was rooting for Trump. His points I agree with, it’s just his image that I’m terrified to support.” She specified that she is turned off by “the way he leads his rallies. Just the whole violence thing, encouraging people to beat up protesters.”
“I don’t feel like anybody in the race, Democrat or Republican, is fit to be president,” said Sumner. Of the Republican Party, he added, “I don’t want to say we’re in trouble, but we’re having problems.”
After the first meeting, Clark said that he had a foundation for the club’s agenda for the immediate future. “We’d like to bring speakers to campus, and to connect students with the Republican party in various ways — by helping them to get involved with campaigns, going to events, networking, socializing, that sort of thing.”
“We talked about possible debates with other political groups,” Landry said. “It’s just us being able to talk about politics in an open and controlled environment, rather than people just going back and forth on Facebook comments. That never really gets anywhere. So we would hope to be able to do that in a more formal setting.”
Sumner, however, insinuated that he has loftier goals for the group.
“I don’t want it to just be a Republican club. I want it to be a conservative movement club,” he said. “We have a humongous international [student] body here, and a lot of people come from conservative-minded countries with conservative-minded ideas. I don’t want to say we’re Republican, because that doesn’t really have a meaning to me. I don’t believe that you’re a Republican or a Democrat, because there’s no such thing. Everybody believes different things.”
Although part of what drove Clark to start the group was a belief that there were others at The New School who shared his political views, most members of The New School College Republicans might have not said the same thing before the group was formed. “A lot of people were shocked to find that there were other conservatives at this school,” Clark said of the first meeting.
Landry counts herself as one of those shocked members. She explained that she was slightly apprehensive about attending The New School because of her political beliefs. “My dad and I are very into politics, so he was telling me, ‘You know, you’re going to be going to a school that is a very liberal school.’ I said, ‘Yeah that’s fine, I’m only there for my education.’ But in the back of my head I was thinking, ‘What am I getting myself into? I know that people are going to judge me for being conservative.’ I was able to get through it, in a way, because I kind of mentally prepared myself for it, and it was kind of a way to test my beliefs.”
Her apprehension wasn’t unfounded. Landry said she would go as far as to say that the environment at The New School can feel hostile sometimes, and she said other club members agree. “Some of us do get verbally attacked in classes or in social groups, just because it is a very progressive school, and some [club members] are very radical.”
As for his own experience, Clark said that he knew what to expect when he made the decision to come to a historically progressive university. “The fact that it’s so liberal here didn’t keep me from coming here. I do want to have my viewpoint challenged. I want to have people disagree with me. I want to go to law school eventually, and having this sort of environment where people challenge me all the time is kind of nice for that.”
Sumner, who grew up as part of a politically active family in southern Georgia in what he calls a “world of conservative idealism,” said that being at The New School has opened his mind in some ways. “I don’t think it’s changed my views in any way. It’s definitely opened my mind to other things.” When asked to specify which things he means, he explained, “Homosexuality, abortion — issues like that — that would be perceived as negative in a place that’s not necessarily a liberal place. Here, that’s thought of to be okay, and that, for me, is something that I can look at and be like, ‘Okay, what are the pros and cons of this situation?’”
As for her own political evolution while at The New School, Landry said, “I actually think it might have made me go towards the right a little bit more.”