By now you probably won’t be surprised to learn something like this has happened — only not on religious lines.

At the University of Miami last fall, four female students tried to form a group called Advocates for Conservative Thought (ACT). As the name suggests, they wanted to focus on the intellectual front, discussing and spreading ideas they believed in. When they went to the committee that approves organizations, however, they were told there was no room for them: There was already a College Republicans chapter on campus, which covered all the conservatives, and already one political discussion forum (called the Council for Democracy). Any other groups would be redundant.

ACT’s founders had good responses to all of this. The College Republicans were about electing candidates and promoting a party’s policies; ACT was about ideas, and far from being Republican partisans, some of its founders were registered Democrats who considered themselves conservative. (As co-president Andrea Kiser said, the group was more interested in promoting positions like a pro-life stance than in supporting candidates.) The Council for Democracy was a neutral forum for debate; ACT was to be devoted to common principles. None of it mattered: ACT was rejected by the committee four times over a period of six months, each time denied the right to (in the official language) “promote the organization and its activities on campus.” They couldn’t advertise, invite speakers or use campus facilities.

I’m glad to report the story didn’t end there. After the third reaction, the ACT founders contacted the campus free-speech group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), which moved fast to expose the double standard.

In April FIRE wrote to the university president, Donna Shalala, pointing out that Miami recognized lots of overlapping groups: Earth Alert and Animal Allies, the Islamic Society and the Muslim Students Organization, Free Tibet and Amnesty International, multiple groups of black, Caribbean, Latin American and Asian students. A few weeks after writing to Shalala, FIRE started publicizing Miami’s actions. Within hours Shalala repudiated the committee’s actions (she said she hadn’t read the letter), and a few days later ACT got its long-overdue recognition. (More details can be found at FIRE’s home page.)

Beyond the happy ending, the story’s worth noting — and not just for the obvious reason that it illustrates campus bias against conservatives, which is already a well-documented phenomenon nationwide.

Let’s assume Shalala’s telling the truth when she said she didn’t know what was going on — in her words, “I did not see the letter and those to whom it was referred did not respond in a timely manner or bring it to my attention.” That’s plausible. But it says something when so many people in official positions — from the members of the committee to the staffers who ignored FIRE’s letter — didn’t see either the unfairness of shooting down ACT or the embarrassment that would result if the story became public. The word “bias” isn’t quite enough to do justice to this pattern. It smacks of pettiness (they couldn’t abide more than a token opposition group) and/or arrogance (they never thought they’d be held accountable).

It should be said that there’s nothing uniquely left-wing about these attitudes. But they’re the sort of thing you get when any group gets as dominant as the left is on many campuses — to the point where they don’t really believe there is such a thing as a legitimate opposition.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the Miami story is that university officials assumed that any self-described conservative group must be Republican. In truth, not all conservatives are Republicans and not all Republicans are conservatives. Many are, but conservatism — like liberalism, libertarianism and any other political ideology — is defined not by a party but by ideas. By contrast, political parties — regardless of what ideas influence their policies — are ultimately about power, and commonly sacrifice principles for power’s sake. That doesn’t mean parties can’t be useful vehicles to advance principles; principled people can do a lot to influence parties. It does mean that parties and ideologies can’t be treated as synonymous.

Admittedly, some ideological people do just that. I know conservatives who wouldn’t dream of criticizing the Republican Party, even when it blatantly departs from its professed standards by, for example, vastly increasing government spending and bureaucracy; sometimes they defend the party, but more often they look the other way and find something else to talk about. (Clinton jokes are a popular standby.) I know liberals who are the same way; during the Clinton scandals, they ignored their own professed standards — on sexual harassment, honesty in government, abuse of power, etc. — to stand by their man.

Yet it should be clear that the ACT students are anything but a partisan front group. After all, they stress issues like abortion — the sort of divisive topic Republican leaders generally downplay. You don’t have to agree with all their ideas to notice that these students aspire to be an independent ideological force. It’s safe to say that sometimes they’ll be aligned with Republicans, but other times they’ll end up pursuing a decidedly different course.

You’d think all those University of Miami officials would have been smart enough to figure that out before someone called the press. Then again, none are so blind as those who will not see.