Fresh off last fall’s historic push to help elect Barack Obama, the University of Colorado’s College Democrats have set their sights on a new target: the school’s plans to bring a professor of conservative thought to campus.

CU leaders last year announced plans to create a $9 million endowment to fund the Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy on the Boulder campus, which long has been derided as a liberal bastion.

So far, CU only has raised $575,000 in private funds toward that goal, campus officials said Monday.

But regardless of how long it may take the university to fully fund the conservative post, College Democrats say they’re not going to wait to launch a campaign against it.

“The entire concept of a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy politicizes academics in a way that is contrary to the university’s mission,” senior Jesse Jensen, president of the College Democrats, said Monday. “By endowing a chair in one specific political ideology, we are not promoting intellectual diversity — we are tokenizing a point of view that should be presented in all classes on political thought.”

CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard said endowed chairs are nothing new in the realm of academic instruction, and the Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy has been discussed on campus for years and has received support from a wide spectrum of faculty members and administrators.

The program, supported by Chancellor G.P. “Bud” Peterson, would invite renowned scholars in the field of conservative thought to CU to serve annual residencies and preside over the discussion of the political ideology’s role in any number of academic disciplines.

“People need to understand what this is before they oppose it in a knee-jerk way,” Hilliard said. “The concept of the endowed chair is to bring in a conservative scholar — not an activist — who has been classically trained, holds an advanced degree and has studied the impact of conservative thought on history, politics and economics.”

Opposing the chair before it’s even been endowed, let alone filled, is premature and unwarranted, Hilliard said, because there are no stipulations requiring those who fill the chair to be aligned with the right.

“It isn’t a requirement that this scholar is even conservative,” Hilliard said. “We have French teachers who aren’t from France . . . We are simply looking to improve intellectual diversity on campus.”

The College Democrats’ Jensen, however, said that if CU is looking to improve academic diversity, creating an endowed chair for conservative professors is going about it in the wrong way.

“One-sided politics have no place in the academic world,” Jensen said. “Our faculty understands that and so do our student leaders. If students want conservative thought, they need only speak up during any political science class and they are bound to find a vocal member of the Republican Party willing to offer a retort.”

Sophomore Gregory Carlson, one such outspokenly conservative member of the student body, said he supports the endowed chair as an effort to help combat the left-leaning bias he believes is prevalent in campus classrooms.

“In my personal experience, there is ample opportunity for students to see the liberal philosophy on matters,” Carlson said. “But I think it’s important for students to see every part of the picture when coming up with opinions about the world.”