The Campus / A Conservative Paper Chase
Souza, Dinesh D'
A CONSERVATIVE PAPER CHASE by Dinesh D' Souza I n the last two years, some 25 conservative newspapers have appeared on the American campus. There are now such papers at Harvard,...
...last winter it sponsored a debate at Harvard between John Kenneth Galbraith, the local pest, and William F. Buckley, Jr., the irredentist ex-Yalie...
...Some 40 colleges were represented at the conference, which the leftist Institute for Policy Studies presaged as politically significant, sending a mole to spy on it...
...When the Supreme Court ruled in favor of turning over Oval Office tape recordings, the President was forced to comply because the people demanded it...
...and others...
...The conservative papers must also find students with the business and legal aptitude to handle incorporation, annual accounting, and government legalese...
...The conservative papers have a different agenda...
...It's a lesson we never can learn too well...
...Like the conservative foundations, they do not give grants contingent upon the recipients' following a pre-set agenda...
...E r all the college hassles and charges of puppetry, the papers will endure...
...This principle urges that persons ought to grant one another an equal right to be free...
...He has also written for National Review, Policy Review, and the National Catholic Register...
...And at the end of it all, the kiddies could cocktail with such thinkers and writers as Irving Kristol, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., Joseph Sobran, and Tom Bethell...
...Our Constitution works...
...Lackner's paper is a resurrection of an old literary monthly at Penn, which went defunct in 1938...
...In addition, the Ivy consortium last winter sponsored a panel of defense experts to straighten out students on the El Salvador issue...
...Now take a look at a couple of papers in embryo: the Sequent, at George Washington University...
...We also need to know why...
...On the contrary...
...The IEA has received notification of nearly 200 conservative papers soon to appear...
...As Prof...
...After all, as late as 1975 conservatives were languishing in the Ivy League and elsewhere, unable to challenge the cartel of liberal faculty, administrators, and radical students...
...blotchy remnants of an unpleasant era, milk gone sour...
...The Claremont Review of Books at Claremont College in California, Counterpoint at the University of Chicago, and the Hillsdale Review at Hillsdale College in Michigan print lengthy essays and book reviews...
...campuses...
...The opposition's tactics have ranged from threats of lawsuit to the assault of a newspaper editor by an enraged college official...
...if the sixties proved anything, it is that academia is vulnerable~ The conservative papers, however, want to go a step further...
...Primarily through the efforts of this group, economist George Gilder spoke at Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale, and Princeton this year...
...Another president, Andrew Jackson, successfully ignored a Supreme Court decision against his plan to move American Indians west of the Mississippi...
...Lackner reports troubles for the paper from the university, in the form of faculty discouragement and bureaucratic Stalling...
...puses in Texas...
...This will come as a surprise to many...
...The American Spectator had its literati on hand to answer erudite questions and make joke s . Professors, editorial writers, and foundation moguls were circulated among the students...
...tor--proceeded to slaughter sacred cows on campus...
...It is true that the conservative papers have been funded, in part, by nonprofit foundations...
...the paper must be good so the aesthetic compensates for the work...
...The student papers have also been plagued by the charge, leveled notably by conspiracy theorists at the Nation, that they are, somehow, tools of corporate America...
...The conservative journals are, for the most part, bankrolled by alumni...
...In the Ivy League they found these in journalism and conservatism...
...the students were treated to some simple techniques parceledas backroom strategy...
...The casual interest was translated into political strategy when longtermers at the lEA and The Alternative Educational Foundation Sponsored a conference in New York this past January to teach students the nuts and bolts of founding and publishing a conservative periodical...
...Bright and energetic students looked to other avenues to vent creativity and zeal...
...Such epithets as "sexist," "insensitive," and "homophobe" have been used in regional publications to describe the editors of these papers...
...TNR' s insight was that the papers are Provocative Reading from PROMETHEUS Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism edited by Paul Kurtz This collection of twenty-one original essays by an impressive list of contributors focuses on the intellectual impact of one of modern America's most influential living philosophers...
...it has already captured Phil Nicolaides and Morton BlackweL1 for its advisory board...
...There is so much demand for information that a former youth coordinator for College Republicans, Steve Baldwin, has set up a news bureau called Project Inform to service the various papers...
...Both will publis h for the first time this fall...
...Academia must not just be dissected, it must also be cured...
...Time and the Nation tried to sneak in writers...
...Mike Waller, a junior at George Washington and editor of the Sequent, has big plans for his paper: He wants to provide "news from the capital" via teletype to all the student papers nationwide...
...It is a biweekly with a small staff and a modest $6,000 budget...
...Conservative students are discovering that they are not part of the "diversity" vaunted at liberal arts colleges...
...Where else would a top college official, in no minced words, call the entire white student body "racist...
...Counterpoint, at the University of Chicago...
...The Yale Lit each month prints powerful indictments of the New York Times Book Review and other pamperers of crime and indhlgence...
...there were rumblings at Yale, Cornell, the University of Texas, Amherst, Northwestern, even Berkeley...
...325 pages $18.95 Cloth The Politics of Procrustes by Antony Flew One of the world's eminent philosophers offers a piercing critique of contemPorary demands for unqualified equality...
...the Yale Political Monthly, at Yale...
...When the Watergate special prosecutor was fired and his office abolished, it was public protest that forced the officeto be reopened and a new special prosecutor appointed...
...But none of them would have been effective if they were not supported by the people...
...Lewis Feuer...
...Counterpoint is a glossy magazine supervised by John Podhoretz, heir to Commentary's Norman...
...Watergate teaches us that only an informed, interested citizenry can ensure that the system works...
...The Red and Blue, on the other hand, is content to deal with problems at its own U-Penn, which are myriad...
...But we knew that at the time...
...Still, college opposition and media mauling can intimidate students, most of whom are not used to waking up to read in the Boston Globe that they belong tO "the politics of hate and resentment...
...What would this accomplish...
...The new prosecutor had no statutory tenure...
...Texas Forum, at the University of Texas...
...They are being told that their publications are splitting up the community, that they are debating "divisive" issues (when we all know that the only debates that should occur are over issues on which there is absolute unanimity...
...And while the alumni are out in the real world, chastised in their idealism by everyday views and events, the college administrators are insulated and unsinged...
...They want to outrage what is more omniscient in, and threatening to, their own worlds: the college administration...
...All three papers have given serious attention to conservative ideology, as opposed to ephemeral issues...
...the Williams Republican, at Williams College...
...The phones at the Dartmouth Review rang constantly...
...The Salient draws on Harvard's graduate school...
...Long after the country stopped talking about black revolution and Take Back the Night, these items still recycled on the agenda for faculty and student groups at the universities...
...Indeed, right after one president resigned, the new president announced: "Our long national nightmare is over...
...But why...
...Jeffrey Hart has said of Dartmouth's course of action: "I've never seen such dirty tricks, and I worked with Chuck Colson...
...It was all hush-hush and conspiratorial...
...The House impeachment committee announced it would not go to court to enforce its subpoena of Watergate tapes...
...Funding for these efforts is being lubricated, advisory boards garnered, exchange and reprint agreements approved, and plans drawn up for annual regional conferences...
...UNITED TECHNOLOGIES Now it can readily be conceded that the papers do not exist to taunt the wishes of faraway alumni...
...Meanwhile, the editors of six Ivy League papers have formed a consortium and arranged for exchange advertising and joint fund-raising maneuvers...
...the California Review, at UCSD...
...Also, the conservative papers have powerful artillery behind them: columnists, donors, politicians...
...But just as pepperish are the California Review and the Williams Republican...
...This charge carries more credibility than that of the Nation...
...Skinner...
...Liberals have their foundations too: Ford, Rockefeller, et al...
...Her story was sardonic, but it only inspired student conservatives at other schools...
...But Watergate a decade later is not about them...
...The raison d'6tre for the Ivy papers was the crust of liberal thinking that had formed on campus...
...A decade's passage of time has prompted many to write where-are-they-now stories about those who took part in the Watergate drama...
...It was becoming almost faddish to start a conservative paper...
...Their ideas stagnated, as did their clothes and belongings...
...Says Avery Lackner, editor of the Penn paper, "We will have our hands full with the home situation...
...The first of the conservative journals was the Dartmouth Review which--despite its East Indian ediDinesh D'Souza is chairman of the Dartmouth Review...
...Flew discusses some of the key topics at issue between libertarians and statists in a down-to-earth yet rigorous manner...
...Texas Forum has, over the years, chalked up a catalogue of woes: colleges refusing to allow circulation on campus, attempts to blackball students writing for the paper, and--in the sixties--firebombing of newspaper stands...
...Certainly the courts, the congressional committees, and the special prosecutor were important...
...Papers are in the works at George Mason University, the University of Missouri at Saint Louis, Wesleyan, the University of Michigan, and Stanford...
...Now let him enforce it...
...But do the papers "pander" to alumni, in the sense of echoing their sentimental dreams of yesteryear...
...Rather, grantees must already be pursuing an approved path...
...The conservative papers at the Ivies and elsewhere are also becoming recruiting centers for the Young America Foundation, Students for Peace and Security, College Republicans, and other such groups...
...Justice Marshall made his decision," Jackson thundered...
...But few of the papers have sustained as brutal a resistance from the college as the Dartmouth Review...
...Remembering what happened is not enough...
...Professors ruminated on it, like cows...
...That the papers express the suppressed angst of alumni is, if anything, latidable...
...The Dartmouth paper is perhaps the most controversial of all the 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 publications, having found its way by now into most of the nation's media, including the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...Finally, the more bellicose the opposition gets, the tougher the students become, and it _9 is not difficult for a plucky lot to penetrate the Maginot Line of the administration...
...Support was so great that the hearings received better ratings than the soap operas they pushed off the air...
...Yet Santayana was only half right...
...they have only an acquiescent student body on which to experiment...
...It's about all of us as Americans...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982...
...The alumni are not hospitable to this notion of a corrupted institution...
...The premises are wrong: These are not ordinary students...
...The squawkings of the Dartmouth faculty when it saw the paper brought a Newsweek reporter on campus...
...130 pages $14.95 Cloth Humanist Manifestos I and II Humanist Manifestos [ and II cite humanist - recommendations for the future of mankind in the areas of religion and ethics, and the humanist views on the meaning of life, civil liberties and democracy, the rights to suicide, abortion, divorce, euthanasia, and sexual freedom...
...Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell...
...Most of the conservative papers, with the notable exception of the Salient, have met with some hostility on campus...
...The conservative papers were born to sink their teeth into this entrenched liberalism...
...Given that all private colleges are heavily subsidized by corporate grants and private donations, given that even government grants include strings and limiting criteria, given that the conservative papers have not received funds from a single profitmaking corporation (not even the oil companies), given the minimal revenue they draw from advertising (which also greases wheels at the Nation), and given the small-business penchant of the newspapers, all of which took a dim view of the Chrysler bailout, the Nation' s accusation is rendered enigmatic...
...The people would have supported him...
...But as liberalism proved to be a bum rap, the rebellious dreamy children of the sixties became the wheezy washouts of the seventies and eighties...
...The New Republic, less enamored of the corporate takeover concept, played a variation on the theme...
...Reason 216 pages $16.95 Cloth The Freedom Principle by Lansing Pollock In this engaging study, the intuitive idea that we should not use other persons "as a mere means" is captured by what Professor Pollock calls the freedom principle...
...Since the papers are voluntary, demoralization can accompany these daily yawners...
...not all may surface, but that is still an impressive statistic...
...40 pages $1.95 Paper PROMETHEUS BOOKS 700 East Amherst Street Buffalo, New York 14215 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1982 2"/ the truncheon.-bearers of vindictive alumni...
...32 pages, $1.95 Paper A Secular Humanist Declaration Endorsed by 58 leading intellectuals, this vital statement defines and defends the specific position of conlemporary secular humanism on ethics, science, religion, and education...
...they want to believe their schools the idyllic places they left long ago...
...National Review, the New York Times, and the New Republic have reported on the college's attempts to block the Dartmouth paper...
...The Nation intimated to its eager readership that, gadzooks, the whole idea of academic freedom is being jeopardized...
...Students are seeing that the universities-sometimes in cahoots with each o t h e r - - a r e making every effort to stop them, in the expectation that the travails of putting out a paper, meeting punishment from the college, and handling course loads will be too much for ordinary students to manage...
...they must storm the citadel from the outside...
...He also wants the Sequent to spread to the other D.C...
...after all, the alumni of a private college finance the institution and ought to have a say in the ethos it adopts...
...The Harvard Salient, the Madison Report, the Dartmouth Review, Texas Forum, the Yale Political Monthly, and the Yale Literary Magazine have already published many issues...
...It wasn't because the people supported the committee...
...The subpoena could have been ignored...
...Focusing on freedom of inquiry and critical intelligence, the Declaration opposes doctrinaire fundamentalism, absolute morality, and political repression...
...Next, Princeton produced the Madison Report, named after James Madison, allegedly Princeton's most illustrious conservative alumnus...
...Owned by Yale graduate Andrei Navrozov, the son of Russian ~migr~ Lev Navrozov, the Lit is a sophisticated review-review...
...There are now such papers at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, the University of Chicago, Hollins, and even the University of California at San Diego...
...Had the people viewed the actions of the courts, Congress, or the special prosecutor as unfair or unwise, the President could have ignored those actions...
...T l~low it is tempting to say that the plaints of faculty and administrative whim-whams are usually not fatal for a newspaper, that they bring needed publicity...
...The real grind for students is quotidian: selling ads, procuring and editing copy, mailing out fundraisers, emptying out trash bags...
...By 1980 it was a crust dry and crumbly, but one that no one could--or wanted to--skim off...
...After all, where else but at U-Penn would an editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian write a column approving of the assassination attempt on President Reagan...
...And what we learn from Watergate tells us more about ourselves than about our system...
...The people judged otherwise and the system worked...
...During Watergate the people backed the courts...
...They are learning the hard way...
...the staff size varies from 10 to 25...
...Of the Dartmouth Review it opined, "Instead of outraging stuffy alumni who harrumph about 'kids today,' The Review panders to them . . . from the start the paper has been in part an expression of the fearsand wants of conservative alumni...
...He wasn't because the people would not have stood for it...
...My informal poll suggests that the grade average on these papers is well above the college mean...
...First, a group of neoconservatives at Harvard founded the Harvard Salient and drew sustenance from the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), which had also funded the Dartmouth Review...
...We look at Watergate now that ten years have passed partly because we believe with Aeschylus that time teaches many lessons, and partly because we recall Santayana's dictum that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...
...and the Red and Blue, at the University of Pennsylvania...
...Texas Forum, the Yale Political Monthly, and the Salient are more ponderous than the Dartmouth Review and feature mainly national commentary...
...Essays by Irving Kristol...
...Claremont and Hillsdale are traditional bulwarks of conservative activity...
...Occasionally the conservative papers have erred on the side of buoyancy and ribald humor...
...The Dartmouth Review and the Madison Report strike a balance between national and local coverage...
...Jackson succeeded because he had public backing...
...The reason the conservative papers get money (usually around $5,000) from right-leaning foundations is because they are good investments in the market of ideas...
...the new version, he says, will be somewhat more political...
...And more th'an 100 conservative journals are due at campuses around the country this fall...
...Yes, it worked...
...they also emphasize investigative reporting...
...it has a staff of 40" undergraduates...
...The country moved along, leaving them behind...
...Budgets are around $10,000...
...Signed by Andrei Sakharov, B.F...
...These phrases and others, like expletive deleted and smoking gun, came to be covered by the umbrella term of Watergate...
...So there is tension between the urgent goals of the students, and the maudlin flashbacks of alumni...
...In this tenth anniversary year of Watergate many people remember that the system worked the way the founding fathers intended...
...Several editors of these journals write for regional and national papers...
...Their scalpel must not only be sharp, it must also be wielded with care...
...The Sequentwill be t h e first student conservative paper in the nation's capital...
...The Review's annual budget is $75,000...
...Sir Julian Huxley: and others...
...The Williams Republican has been targeted by deans, under pressure from the fillies of the feminist movement...
...the Naked Eye, at Brown...
...Looking Back at Watergate Ten years ago, strange phrases began | c r e e p i n g into our national vocabulary: stonewalling, deep six, limited hangout, the Big Enchilada...
...Charles Kesler at the Salient, for example, is a regular contributor to National Review...
...Simply put, they need more waking up than do the alumni...
...If they are to succeed in their mission, they must be more discriminating...
...Texas Forum was founded in the early sixties and is now distributed to several cam...
...At Villanova University in Pennsylvania the newly formed Villanova Free Press lashed out at the disarmament movement...
...The papers are now in various stages of maturity...
...The Yale Literary Magazine and the Dartmouth Review have been threatened by the administration for using the college name...
...He could have been fired as well...
...This is because the papers are tax exempt, and abide by the philanthropic goals of the various foundations...
...These included thepapers at Dartmouth, Harvard, and princeton, as well as: the Morningside Review, at Columbia...
...The people supported gavel-to-gavel TV coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings because of their desire to know for themselves what happened...
...Baldwin will provide papers with start-up packages, fund-raising and legal advice, and news'releases about events at other schools...
...Their children were snot-nosed...
...and the Northwest Review, at Northwestern University...
...The papers have been frank in reminding alumni of the realities of' today's school system--in most cases the grim reality of entrenched liberalism...
...By August this year there were between 20 and 25 papers in operatiori...
...the Princeton paper comes out fortnightly and consequently is smaller...
Vol. 15 • October 1982 • No. 10
