With the 2024 general election just weeks away, Duke students have stepped up their mobilization efforts in preparation for some tight North Carolina races. But on-campus politics were long missing an important stakeholder: the Duke College Republicans.
Amid ongoing ideological tensions within the Republican Party and increased calls for ideological diversity in higher education, Republican mobilization on campus has been almost non-existent.
DCR President Zander Pitrus, a junior, shared that he is tired of Republican students feeling ostracized on campus — leading him to re-establish the club’s presence on campus.
“We are able to defend why we are conservative,” Pitrus said. “We are able to defend our ideas and morals, but people don’t believe that on campus.”
Pitrus announced the club’s formation in a Monday post on the DCR Instagram page, outlining its goals of “advancing the timeless virtues of tolerance, the spirited contest of ideas and civil disagreement through the scope of Republican causes.”
While Duke Democrats has increased its presence on campus in recent years through campaigns to register and educate student voters and phone bank in support of Democratic candidates, its Republican complement had been inactive since 2020.
Pitrus believes unifying and promoting conservative perspectives is essential to protecting free speech and intellectual growth at Duke.
According to The Chronicle's Class of 2027 survey, about 58% of now-sophomores said they were “somewhat” or “very” liberal, while 27.5% identified as moderates and 14.3% identified as “somewhat” conservative or conservative.
This represents an increase in ideological diversity compared to the Class of 2026. In The Chronicle's Class of 2026 Survey, nearly 72% of now-juniors said they were “somewhat” or “very” liberal, while 18% identified as moderates and nearly 10% identified as “somewhat” conservative or conservative.
The liberal imbalance at Duke mirrors a similar national imbalance of liberal professors and students on college campuses, fueling claims by conservative politicians that higher education suffers from a left-leaning bias.
Some have promoted “viewpoint diversity” and “dialogue across difference” as solutions to this imbalance and the accompanying trend of rising political polarization in the United States. Action steps proposed thus far have included increasing the percentage of conservative students and faculty on campus, as well as requiring regular evaluations of professors’ abilities to foster “intellectual diversity” in the classroom.
Duke has instituted a variety of initiatives aimed at fostering intellectual diversity and dialogue across differences, including the Civil Discourse Project, which sponsors courses, events and scholarships that promote bipartisan conversations. The administration also recently charged a new faculty committee with reevaluating the University’s policy on academic freedom, which has not been updated since 1976.
The 2020 dissolution of Duke College Republicans
Duke College Republicans disbanded in 2020 due to ideological tensions within the group. These tensions reflected larger ideological debates within the Republican Party surrounding the clash between traditional conservatism and Trump’s populism.
In 2016, Duke College Republicans chose to abstain from endorsing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Five DCR members came out with a statement against him. At the time, College Republican clubs around the nation were divided over whether to endorse Trump.
According to Peter Feaver, professor of political science and former faculty adviser for DCR, the club “found it really difficult to navigate the Trump years and finally just collapsed” in the fall of 2020 during Trump’s reelection campaign.
In a 2020 Chronicle article, former DCR member Karl Harrison, Trinity ‘20, described the dissolution of the club as a result of tensions as a split between social conservatives and economic conservatives in the club.
Feaver distanced himself from the club due to his opposition to Trump. He identifies as a “real Republican” who is “not completely at home in the current Republican Party.” He believes Trump’s rise to power has weakened the party’s values and capabilities, asserting that once Trump “pass[es] from the political scene,” it can rebuild to become more “healthy.”
Pitrus claims that Trump is a “more moderate candidate” than the media has portrayed him to be and that the former president did not “undermine” democratic processes on Jan. 6.
Duke College Republicans reborn
Pitrus restarted Duke College Republicans to give Republican students a space on campus to unite around shared conservative values and support the election of Republican candidates.
According to Pitrus, “left-leaning” professor Abdullah Antepli, professor of the practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy, has agreed to be DCR’s faculty adviser. Pitrus referred to Antepli as students’ “last beacon of hope for free speech” on campus, claiming that Duke suffers from “a lack of conservative faculty.”
Pitrus follows the Duke Students for Trump Instagram account, which he says is the only semblance of Republican mobilization at Duke this election season. According to him, although it has served as an anonymous outlet where students can express their support for Trump without being “afraid of sharing those perspectives,” the account “doesn’t really serve a great purpose if there isn’t an organization on campus” to host these students.
“The founder of Duke Students for Trump is actually extremely afraid of expressing his identity, which is also an issue,” Pitrus said.
He noted that the account does not represent a formal organization on campus, adding that he wanted to revive the Duke College Republicans to create a space where Republicans can share their perspectives with like-minded peers.
Although Pitrus hopes that members of the club would support Trump as this year’s Republican presidential nominee, he is accepting of the fact that many members might not agree with some of the former president’s actions or even vote for him this fall.
He wants the club to be a place where all members feel free to express their political beliefs, recognizing that ideological differences exist among conservatives and advocating for members to “embrace those differences.” Pitrus also aims to “engage with people from the opposing side” of an issue — including the liberal majority on campus, who he thinks would benefit from challenges to their views.
“I’m actually concerned for liberals on campus because they come to this institution and their beliefs are constantly reaffirmed by their peers and professors and administrators and not challenged in any sense,” he said. “When you go out in the real world, you have no idea of how to have a constructive conversation with people and [have] constructive disagreement.”
Struggles with ideological diversity on campus
While some faculty have identified a perceived lack of ideological diversity on campus, it remains unclear whether the problem is rooted in a lack of conservative representation on campus or existing conservative perspectives being stifled by the dominance of liberal rhetoric in higher education.
“It would be better for Duke and it would be better for Duke students if there was a richer menu of intellectual diversity to include political diversity” Feaver said. He finds it unfortunate that the political diversity at Duke is nowhere near the national representation.
However, Feaver thinks that “given how little viewpoint diversity there is among the faculty, Duke is managing the environment reasonably well.” As director of the Duke Program in American Grand Strategy, he invites speakers with diverse political views to engage with a Duke audience.
Still, Fever struggles as one of the only conservative faculty members, sharing that he is “tokenized and forced to stand in for others” in on-campus media and events as a conservative faculty member. Yet, he continues to voice his perspective to stand up for conservative students “who feel like their voice is suppressed or at least marginalized.”
“I wish I had more conservative students. I wish I had more conservative colleagues,” said Eric Mlyn, lecturer in the Sanford School who promotes the importance of bipartisan discourse on campus.
Pitrus thinks there are an adequate number of Republicans on campus, but they are afraid to express their opinions in Duke’s political climate. He feels many liberal students and faculty dismiss Republican perspectives as less “intellectually capable” without hearing them out and claimed that administrators tend to support this dismissal.
“[Administrators] claim to support civil dialogue by bringing in people like Liz Cheney … who they know is going to endorse a Democratic candidate,” he said. “They aren’t going to bring someone who’s pro-Trump to this campus, and they never have.”
While Mlyn agrees Duke should let election deniers speak on campus, he thinks hiring one to teach public policy or political science raises complicated questions about academic integrity.
“How can we let someone who teaches that the 2020 election was stolen be deemed an expert by our University when all subject experts, the courts and many from the Trump administration reject this [Make America Great Again] narrative as absurd?” he asked.
While proponents of viewpoint diversity believe it enriches the pursuit of knowledge for all, many leaders on college campuses worry it has been weaponized by far-right politicians as a means of undermining racial and ethnic diversity efforts.
In May, the University of North Carolina System’s Board of Trustees voted to strip $2.3 million of state funding from DEI initiatives, preceding a September announcement of system-wide program cuts. Duke students expressed disappointment at the move, and some reflected on what they viewed as “empty gestures” by University administration to promote DEI on Duke’s campus.
In light of these concerns, Mlyn believes it is important to “talk about inclusion in the broadest possible sense.” He thinks Duke should prioritize racial, ethnic, economic and political diversity on campus, whether through recruitment of students and faculty or through academic instruction.
Feaver understands where these concerns are coming from. However, he thinks if Duke doesn't act now to increase the representation of conservative views on campus, it will “seem to be an inhospitable environment for intellectual debate.”
“We're all on this intellectual pursuit, and it's important that in this pursuit, people are challenged in their beliefs — or else there would be no purpose of education at all,” Pitrus said.
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Rae Rackley is a Trinity sophomore and a staff reporter for the news department.