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He became a Communist while sitting on a bench outside of Hamilton Hall.

Whittaker Chambers enrolled at Columbia in 1920. A staunch conservative, he campaigned so fiercely for Calvin Coolidge that his academics were affected. “I’m so busy with politics that I can’t keep up with my work,” he told one instructor.

He left Columbia in 1925, during his junior year. He decided to become a Communist from a vantage point known to all of us Columbia students, looking at the “little Greek shrine” and “my political hero,” the statue of Alexander Hamilton, American revolutionary.

I became a conservative while sitting in the West End discussing politics with my father, uncle, and cousin. I had entered Columbia as a conventional liberal, vaguely irritated by the McCain sticker on the door of a kid on my John Jay Seven floor.

I had changed over the course of my first year at Columbia. I had witnessed a hunger strike orchestrated by campus leftists in the fall semester, during which the administration agreed to negotiate with a tiny group of students who threatened their own lives in order to alter the Core curriculum. I came to grips with the tension between my Midwestern upbringing and an Ivy League education, and realized who held the reins of power in society. That summer, the first man I had dated in college warily confessed to me that he was a conservative (“but fiscal, not social,” as he put it) while we walked through Riverside Park.

A tangle of questions and discontents had accumulated during my first year at the University. And as I sat in the West End listening to my father, my disparate thoughts suddenly assembled themselves. I held the same values, but my conception of society and government had changed. With a brutal and compelling might, my politics were reorganized and transferred onto a new framework of ideas. It was as though someone had roughly run a comb through my matted hair.

By the autumn of my sophomore year, I was reading Plato’s “Republic” in Contemporary Civilization, deeply disturbed by his scheme of social control through government. I began checking RealClearPolitics.com on a daily basis, and perusing books by F.A. Hayek. Sitting alongside Lauren Salz, BC ’11 and executive director of the Columbia University College Republicans, I found myself criticizing Barack Obama and defending Sarah Palin in a campus panel on gay rights.

Columbia University is perceived as a liberalizing influence, a bastion of left-wing politics. It stands head and shoulders above the other Ivy League schools in this regard, partly because of the campus protests of 1968. In recent years as well, Columbia has represented an anathema to the American right. Students rushed the stage when Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project spoke against illegal immigration, causing a furor on Fox News and right-wing blogs. Socialist conferences dot the campus calendar, and Bill O’Reilly referred to the school as University of Havana, North.

In such an environment, Columbia students often assume their peers can be relied on as fellow liberals, with amusing or awkward results. On the morning President Obama won his Nobel Peace Prize, I had a meeting with two students I barely knew. One boy began to bemoan the hysterical reaction of right-wingers and ended with a tangent about how President Reagan had destroyed America. After letting out some steam, he asked whether we agreed, doubtless piqued by my studied expression of restraint. “I’m dating X,” said the girl sitting with us, referring to a prominent right-leaning figure on campus (who shall remain unnamed). “And he’s moderate compared to me.”

It was a nice moment of camaraderie. Conservative students are used to being met with opposition, yet these flashes of mutual understanding are not entirely unexpected. After all, this is the school where Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Thomas Sowell studied economics. Eric Cantor and Judd Gregg attended Columbia, as did David Horowitz and Pat Buchanan. Jack Kerouac played football here before dropping out of college (he would remain a political conservative throughout his life). Chris Kulawik, currently an editor for the Harvard Law Review, is still remembered by many on campus for his provocative conservative activism.

Today Columbia has a robust body of students who identify as conservatives, but with views ranging widely from economic libertarianism to moderate Republicanism to social conservatism. Their one unifying factor may be nothing more than dissent from the dominant form of liberalism—a dissent that proves more productive than reactionary.

I interviewed about 20 students for this article. Some write publicly as self-identified conservatives for Spectator, but many students aren’t plugged into such a campus organization and keep their politics mostly to themselves. (One helpful identifying feature: A girl swearing audibly at her New York Times in my economics class on the day Paul Krugman won his Nobel Prize. The Nobel announcements are rarely a happy day for conservatives.)

One student told me to keep my voice down when I asked to interview him. Some asked for a few days to think it over. Many asked detailed questions about anonymity and asked that certain portions of the interview be kept off the record.

“It’s not that I’m afraid to talk about politics, but it’s kind of an inconvenience,” explains William Prasifka, CC ’12 and member of the College Republicans. “Being conservative at Columbia implies a bit of backwardness. You have to know someone before you can show them that you’re not all that backward.”

When conservative students were asked to identify themselves politically, nearly all of them mentioned characteristics of mainstream American conservatism, especially limited government and the importance of tradition. Each, however, had a very specific set of definitions and qualifications. Just as the diverse liberal students of Columbia could not be grouped into one partisan bloc, there is no monolith of opinion for conservative students.

“I’m an undefined libertarian,” says Diana Greenwald, CC ’11. “My views are fairly conservative, bordering on a libertarian squishiness,” says John McClelland, GS. Several people identified as independent, and registered Republicans were in the minority (though the majority voted Republican in the 2008 presidential elections). Many resisted labels altogether. “I’m a neo-liberal,” Scott St. Marie, CC ’10, says when I ask him to describe his politics. And does he identify as a conservative? “Yes,” he replies matter-of-factly.

Students generally acknowledge that “conservatism” and “the right” are vague definitions. Armin Rosen, List ’10, describes the conservative/liberal binary of contemporary American politics as “helpful shorthand that glosses over a lot of nuance and an awful lot of incoherency.” Two weeks in Contemporary Civilization will reveal the insufficiency of these broad generalizations. Many campus conservatives find their defining political beliefs—free trade, individual rights, limited government—defended by men like Adam Smith, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson, who have often been described as part of the liberal tradition (though cited frequently by American conservatives today). Quite a few cited Hannah Arendt’s “On Totalitarianism” to illustrate their views. Edmund Burke, though cherished by many conservatives on campus, is certainly not the only ideological foundation for these students, though sometimes treated by professors as the token conservative of the Core Curriculum.

“I don’t think there’s a standard of conservatism,” says Derek Turner, CC ’12, a hypothesis that bore out over the course of my interviews. Conceptions differ dramatically from student to student. An economics student said that rationality should define the laws of the state. By contrast, a philosophy student said that no government should presume that humanity operates based on reason alone.

On the topic of morality and religion, meanwhile, students worked from explicitly contradictory principles. “Conservatism in a sense presupposes some standard of morality. … The lines tend to blur as we edge towards moral relativism today,” says Sarah Michelle Kupferberg, BC ’10. Yet Greenwald disavows the influence of morality in the formation of her political beliefs. “If anything, my political view has been affected by the fact that people consider politics and morality completely intertwined. In response, I’ve tried to make my political views as practical and pragmatic as possible, because I don’t want to get into a moral debate,” she counters.

Despite these differences, students agreed that the term “conservative” served as a helpful catchall and had some explanatory power. “Conservative is a basic adjective I use to describe myself,” Salz says. “I mainly agree with the conservative movement that is presently in the United States,” she continues, “but I am not committed to any political ideology other than my own moral code and values.”

Several suggested that the only characteristic Columbia conservatives have in common is an opposition to the dominant politics on the campus, which students unanimously described as “liberal” (while still acknowledging many varieties and manifestations). All of the students recognized a significant tension between their own beliefs and mainstream campus views. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” observes Aarti Iyer, CC ’11. “The unifying factor is that they’re not all Democrats. They might be Bible-belt Christians, or libertarians, or people who just don’t like Obama,” she continues.

“Conservatism, to me, is skepticism. It’s a realistic look at how people actually operate,” McClelland says. “Conservatism is that people don’t follow ideology—they are skeptical of everything that comes along.” He cited his military experience in Afghanistan as one important factor in his political development, as it dissuaded him from an idealistic view of exporting democracy (a liberal belief held by many recent presidents).

“Conservatism is anti-liberalism,” Rosen claims, “the idea that we need to be skeptical of any major change.” He rejects “meaningless contrarianism,” and says instead that conservatism must be a “meaningful opposition,” a belief “appealing, feasible, in conversation with the big questions of the times, as opposed to reflexively saying no to every revolutionary design that’s out there.”

Skepticism entered into almost all the students’ descriptions of conservatism. Turner says that conservatism “leads me to be distrustful of the newest idea and put it up against what’s been proven.” For this reason, they tend to be skeptical of the burgeoning political activities of the student body at Columbia, which dutifully fills bulletin boards with various schemes to improve the world. The problem with relating to the student body, as Greenwald says, is that “when you’re trying to talk with an idealist, they can’t believe that you have such a disillusioned view of the world when you’re 20.”

Many students had not held such worldviews prior to college, and several—like myself—were liberals when they first became politically conscious. Conservative students nearly unanimously agreed that they had become more conservative over the course of their educations. Only in one case did a student who identified as conservative become more liberal after entering Columbia. Jonathan Hollander, CC ’10, began his collegiate career with a “social-conservative bent,” but this “changed very quickly.” Previously opposed to abortion and gay marriage, he now considers himself a social liberal.

More commonly, students who were originally liberals switched to conservative views in their last few years of high school or first years of college. Iyer became politically aware at the age of 13, at which point she was “very, very liberal” and “vehemently opposed to the Iraq War.” She describes her development as a shift in priorities: “National security was getting more and more important to me, and I felt that Republicans were the party that I wanted to entrust the country’s national security with.” Salz, too, became a fiscal conservative only after a gap year working in Africa before beginning college, where her views of liberal aid were shattered.

A few students did significantly change their political beliefs while studying at Columbia. One senior majoring in history joined the College Democrats during his first year, assuming he was a liberal, but Columbia made him “consider whether I was ever actually on the left.” “There are probably lots and lots of students here who come to Columbia and see liberalism at its absolute very worst,” Rosen postulates. “They’ve stared into the dark heart of something that should never leave this campus.” What would happen if all the flyers advocating social change on any given bulletin board at Columbia suddenly came true, or if the youth of Columbia suddenly gained all the power in the country?

Columbia conservatives may disagree with the majority of the student body, but they still tend to characterize their peers as open-minded and reasonable. “I encounter a lot of resistance to my beliefs, but it’s generally respectful resistance. I’ve never felt threatened or persecuted,” Hollander says. Salz receives cruel comments in anonymous forums online, but she said that students are respectful in face-to-face conversation. “Since I’ve become a columnist,” she says, “I’ve received more of a positive reaction on campus. I’ve had people approach me in the supermarket, in bars, in Lerner.”

Students expect and enjoy friendly mudslinging among peers but say that the classroom environment should not be so partisan. Numerous students wished there were more conservative faculty members. Some said they had never encountered any.

Professor of the humanities Mark Lilla writes in an e-mail that unlike other prestigious universities Columbia lacks a scholar “engaged in developing the political principles of conservatism,” and says that most students would “benefit enormously from confronting serious conservative intellectuals and books on campus, not so they change their views necessarily, but so they can refine them.”

The behavior of the faculty varies considerably. Austin Byrd, CC ’10, says that his experiences have ranged from “very fair and respectful and informed” to “utterly foolish.” He recalls with displeasure a French exam that asked students to conjugate verbs in sentences that mocked Sarah Palin and praised Michelle Obama. He also mentions repeated anti-conservative comments in Frontiers of Science lectures, which culminated in one professor placing an image of George W. Bush next to a monkey. These throwaway comments add up and can marginalize conservative opinion through social pressures rather than rigorous argumentation. “They’re creating an environment that’s not intellectually credible,” he complains. “They’re not making arguments, they’re throwing bombs.”

Other students feel even more alienated. “I have cried before in a class,” Salz confesses. She mentions one seminar, when students would disrupt her contributions by whispering and rolling their eyes, a practice she says her professor never tried to stop. Greenwald says that anti-conservative comments in classrooms can be subtle, but they are “glaringly obvious if you do hold the opposite political views.” “I never reveal my political views to professors, ever,” she says flatly.

The relations with the administration have also sometimes been frosty, although most campus leaders of conservative organizations say the staff is very professional. There was one notable incident during Resident adviser training this fall, in which a staff member from the Office of Multicultural Affairs said that the organization was founded in response to several incidents on campus, “including the affirmative-action bake sale set up by the Columbia University College Republ...” Before the staff member could finish saying the name of the group, Interim Associate Dean of Student Affairs Melinda Aquino cut her off. The problem—CUCR did not set up the bake sale. As Chuck Roberts, CC ’12 and an RA himself, points out, the implication was that a conservative group “broke school policy and crossed a line somewhere into something that’s not acceptable to the University.”

He says that the event may have been controversial or even disagreeable, but that the administration should not be taking sides against a student group, especially one that was not involved. Concerned that inaccurate information will tar all conservative groups in a training meant to educate all resident advisors about bias and discrimination on campus, Roberts met with members of the OMA to request that a correction be sent to the RAs, but none has come.

Even with its tensions, Columbia University proves to be a scintillating environment for conservative students, and pushes many further from liberalism. “If you consistently have to defend conservative ideas, the ideas just get more conservative over time,” Prasifka says. “People here can defend their ideas,” McClelland observes, “they understand why they believe in conservatism.” Furthermore, conservative students enjoy learning about alternative points of view, which often affect their own beliefs. “I was able to consider ideals that may not be in line with the classic American ideals that I was brought up with, but allowed me to reinforce or in some cases reconsider the value of those ideas,” Wilkes recalls.

Lilla identifies a dynamic that nearly every student echoes. Although he said he has met few conservative students, those he has known have impressed him. “They spend a lot of time defending their positions, which sharpens their minds—never a bad thing,” he says.

Perhaps if Whittaker Chambers had actually graduated from college, he would never have become a Communist spy. But then he might never have reemerged to publish “Witness,” a classic text of the American right. This transformation—young Republican to undercover Communist to conservative hero—may be dizzying. Indeed, giving sensitive information to foreign governments may not be a healthy part of intellectual development. Yet I find something appealing about the implications of his ambiguous journey. The sum of these conflicting perspectives came together in one person as they should on Columbia’s campus, or across our divided nation. For me, the root of conservatism is the realization that we see the world through a glass darkly. We are young, trapped in one moment of history and given one limited perspective. But so were all the sages. We do what we can.