Student Spotlight - Lauren Salz

It was a “highly anticipated” sold-out evening event. Outside the auditorium, dissidents handed out leaflets urging organized audience disruption. Inside security was tight and organizers were apprehensive.

Barnard College sophomore and Columbia University College Republican Executive Director Lauren Salz took the stage, explaining that the event’s organizers believed Columbia students would greatly benefit from hearing the perspective of the evening’s controversial speaker, who would help fill what they saw as an ideological void on campus.

So began this spring’s Ann Coulter lecture at Columbia, and it proceeded with “an unexpected general air of receptivity among the audience” (campus daily newspaper) and led “to a surprisingly entertaining evening of sharp exchanges” (campus blog).

Lauren’s successful conservative leadership has been a gradual process. A social pro-life conservative in her pre-teens, the economics major was “still fiscally quite progressive until I took a gap year and did volunteer work in developing countries. My experiences abroad challenged many of the assumptions I had previously made about the way the world works, and it forced me to rethink my political beliefs.”

The experience also expanded her activism into a broad range of conservative issues. She and her fellow conservatives hosted David Horowitz as a guest campus lecturer before Coulter. And they were actively involved in the student vote on whether to allow NROTC back on Columbia’s campus. For three weeks prior to the vote, she and fellow activists postered the entire campus several times over. “The night before the vote, we put letters under 3,000 doors. It was incredible, even though we lost by 39 votes.”

“For some students, it can be very intimidating to voice their conservative opinions, for fear of being ridiculed by their peers,” Lauren observes. She draws daily encouragement from Albert Einstein’s words: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Believing every moment is a gift from God, Lauren chooses the latter.

Today in addition to the Executive Director position on College Republicans, Lauren serves as Communications Coordinator for the Columbia Political Union, Communications Director for Columbia Right to Life, and a columnist for the campus newspaper, Columbia Daily Spectator.

One of Lauren’s favorite conservative leaders and role-models is Margaret Thatcher.

The Iron Lady took on the trade unions and won, privatized many national British industries, and boldly opposed Soviet communism. She never shied away from hard public stances, even during times when they were unpopular. This takes an enormous amount of courage.

As the Coulter event shows, Lauren has developed a pretty deep reservoir of courage, too.

Lauren is pictured below with a group of Vietnamese children with whom she worked during her gap year abroad.

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein