Jean Yarbrough explains

The great Jean Yarbrough teaches government at Bowdoin College. Professor Yarbrough is the author of the indispensable and award-winning book Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition. We have celebrated Professor Yarbrough several times on Power Line, including via Steve Hayward’s induction of her into our (incomplete) Power Line 100.

Professor Yarbrough recently explained to a packed house at Bowdoin how she became a conservative and she gave them something to think about. Rebecca Goldfine reports:

Taking her cue from the Lady Gaga song “Born This Way,” government professor Jean Yarbrough announced at a recent talk about her politics that she “was not born this way.”

“I was not born into a conservative family, I was not born into a Republican family, and I am still an outlier in my birth family,” revealed Yarbrough, who is Bowdoin’s Gary M. Pendy Professor in Social Sciences, Government and Legal Studies and an expert in political philosophy and American political thought.

The talk was organized by the Eisenhower Forum, a conservative-leaning political discussion group at Bowdoin. The club says its mission is to promote intellectual diversity on a mostly liberal campus. Yarbrough’s talk, “How I Became a Conservative,” drew an overflow crowd in the Pickering Room of Hubbard Hall.

With humor and self-revealing stories, Yarbrough detailed her journey from student radical to conservative intellectual. She didn’t shy [away] from outlining her beliefs, despite addressing a mixed audience of Democrats and Republicans.

Whole thing here. Please pass it on.

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