A prominent conservative complaint is that colleges and universities are bastions of liberalism where conservative ideas are denounced and where conservative students can feel unwelcome. Business Insider reports that some liberal colleges are trying to change that by recruiting conservative professors to add diversity to their campuses in what it described as a "kind of affirmative action" for conservative educators.
The University of Colorado Boulder, for one, began a program in 2013 to bring conservative professors to the school, and now welcomes a new professor every year as a "visiting scholar in conservative thought." Frank Beckwith was the most recent, from Baylor University, a Baptist school in Texas, and taught courses in philosophy, religion, and law at Boulder.
Showing the kind of influence the program can have, Beckwith shared a note with BI that he'd received from a student after the semester ended that he said "kind of chokes" him up. It said: "I have come to believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to listen to points of view unlike one's own. Liberal Democrat that I am, you made the job a pleasure. You also taught me that kindness, courtesy, and humility would at least get an audience to listen to you in a way that criticism never can."