Natalie Cuzmenco was an accounting major at Elon University when she came to CBLPI as an intern in the summer of 2013 (pictured below, left).
She had already experienced “undisguised” liberal bias in her coursework on campus: a Middle Eastern course professor who argued with her that capitalism is a terrible “oppressive” system; a religion professor whose first class assignment was to “list all the reasons why the Bible isn’t true.”
She had also been embroiled in radical liberal student protests that have become common campus fare today.
Last year, the LGBTQIAA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, Ally) group on campus submitted a piece of legislation to our Student government Association to have the Chick-Fil-A restaurant removed from our campus because CEO Dan T. Cathy openly supports traditional marriage. As a member of the Student Government, I fought against the removal of Chick-Fil-A. We spent many hours at our meetings listening to members of the LGBTQIAA group and other supporters speak out against the fast food franchise. They said the mere presence of the restaurant “oppressed their human rights” and that the sandwiches represented homophobia. I never understood how a sandwich could represent anything other than a sandwich. After a year of back and forth debates, Elon decided to keep Chick-Fil-A on campus.
Natalie’s worldview was shaped by her family’s experience. Her grandparents fled to Argentina to avoid religious persecution in the communist Soviet Union. Years later, when a military dictatorship took power, her parents fled Argentina to the United States. As a r
esult, her love of the U.S. Constitution and the free-market economic system runs deep.
This background served her well at Elon. An outspoken conservative, she brought conservative CBLPI speakers to campus to offer a counterpoint to the pervasive liberal bias. She later shared her campus experiences at a Circle of Friends dinner in Seattle WA (photo right).
Today Natalie is a CPA and Senior Accountant at a Fortune 500 company. Her professional interests still include government affairs, public policy broadly, and regulatory and tax policy specifically.
Now Natalie is embarking on a new phase of life: the career/family balancing act. Married in 2016, she and her husband recently had their first child, a beautiful little girl.
We have no doubt she will be raised with the same enduring conservative values as her mom!
