Conservatives are back in the Ivy League. The Yale College Republicans are back after a six-year hiatus. While left-leaning students are making a superficial noise, the downstream trend may be shifting to the right.
2016, Donald Trump's nomination Divided Yale Republicans into two factions.. Students who supported him kept the organization's name, while those who did not called themselves Yale New Republicans. Divided, they were weak. Both organizations ceased to exist in 2018.
In January, a small group of students vowed to disrupt the Yale Democratic Party's unwavering grip on the election campaign.
“There was a political vacuum in conservative thought,” Manuneethi Amparagan, president of the Yale College of Republicans, told me in an interview. YCR allows students to “take a stance without fear of going too far.”
As freshmen toured Yale this spring, more than 40 freshmen participated in an event hosted by the newly formed YCR. Anparagan said that's more than the number of people who attended the Yale Democratic Party event. This month, another 40 people signed up to join the group at the extracurricular fair, and about 25 people attended YCR's first event, the Presidential Debate Watch Party. There is now 100 students join group mailing list.
Yale University has more than 6,700 undergraduate students. Amparagan believes there is a lot of untapped potential here. “We’re still doing public relations and trying to get email lists,” he says. But 100 students with almost no advertising is a strong start.
The success of Yale's Buckley Institute also bodes well for YCR. Buckley Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to free speech and intellectual diversity that engages students through lecture series, intense debates, and dinner seminars with distinguished guests. Since its founding in 2011, Buckley College has grown to 783 student fellows each year, representing 11 percent of the undergraduate population. As a result, Yale University's free speech ranking rose from 234th out of 248 universities to 155th out of 257 universities. According to to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Yale Republicans differentiate themselves by taking positions on issues and working on political campaigns, but the Buckley Institute cannot do that as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. . “We want to say, 'This is what we believe and we're not going to be complacent about it,'” Amparagan says.
YCR's core beliefs are “personal responsibility, economic freedom, and an unwavering belief that everyone can achieve the American Dream,” Anparagan wrote in an email announcing the organization's return. “We are a community united by a shared belief in the promise of America.”
Anparagan is planning to host a barbecue with Yale Democrats. “My goal is to dispel the myths about the Republican Party that they are not the evil monsters that the media portrays them to be,” he says. We are just normal people with different views than you. ”
Buckley Institute has grown over the past 13 years. Yale University rose 79 spots in the free speech rankings in one year. Republican College of America was founded in 2023; chapter Located on 155 campuses in 24 states. Anparagan is considering adding Yale Republicans to that list, which would be the first chapter of Deep Blue Connecticut. Is there a conservative awakening happening on college campuses?
Gabriel Diamond is a research fellow at Yorktown Research Institute.
