Of course, this is not the first time conservatives forged in the fires of elite institutions have ruled over Washington, nor is it the first time they’ve felt outnumbered on college campuses. William F. Buckley Jr.’s “God and Man at Yale,” published in 1951, famously captured the hostility he felt as an undergraduate in the late 1940s.

But most of the postcollegiate conservatives I spoke to felt glad not to be on a campus right now. The incident at Middlebury College this month, in which demonstrators disrupted a lecture by the “Bell Curve” co-author Charles Murray, prompted a resurgence of debate in conservative circles about liberal students’ intolerance of ideas they disagree with. But that debate also has a flip side: What is life on the defensive doing to the conservative students?

Last week, I went to a screening of a film by Rob Montz, a follow up to his documentary “Silence U: Is the University Killing Free Speech and Open Debate?” Like Mr. Montz, a 2005 graduate of Brown, some in the audience of about 30 had once been conservative- or libertarian-leaning students on overwhelmingly liberal campuses, and the location for the screening felt apropos: It was held in Washington’s Adams Morgan neighborhood, in a space where filmmakers and other creative types work. A framed front page of The Washington Post announcing Richard Nixon’s resignation decorated the room; on ground level was a feminist pop-up shop called the Outrage, selling “Nasty Women Unite” apparel.

The film was the second part of a series Mr. Montz has been working on about political debate on campus. In the first, he returned to his alma mater to cover the fallout of protests that shut down an appearance by New York’s police commissioner Ray Kelly, in 2013; his latest examined the drama at Yale in 2015 over a lecturer’s email to students questioning the administration’s guidance on offensive Halloween costumes.

Mr. Montz considers himself the beneficiary of a campus culture that fostered free debate. “I had a couple of public debates on race relations in America” at Brown, he recalled. As Mr. Montz tells it, he got destroyed in those debates, and it was a good thing. “It informed a lot of the way I think about race relations now,” he said. But being right of center on campus when Mr. Montz went to Brown — only a little over a decade ago — now feels remarkably changed.

He’s met students who support Mr. Trump “because it’s cool to be hyper-reactionary, it makes them different,” he said. “An easy way to develop a reputation is to be super far-right. And they’re allowed to sit in their largely undercooked beliefs because they aren’t getting really serious pushback, they’re just getting garbage protest hysterics.”

Still, as headline-generating as the student provocateurs of the kind who organize lectures by Mr. Yiannopoulos might be, the college Republicans I spoke to said that the more typical conservative-leaning student still feels inhibited about expressing political views on campus.