Student editors and their papers are ready on the right
Crusading campus journalists: the phrase seems an echo from the dawn of the 1970s, when liberal young men and women in weathered jeans and lumberjack flannels would rail impassionedly at college deans and Uncle Sam for supposed indifference to the will of the people. In the years since, campuses all but fell silent. Now students are crusading again, attacking the same ready targets but from a diametrically opposite direction: the right.
Within the past two to three years, more than a dozen conservative publications have sprung up on major American campuses, including Stanford and the prestigious Claremont Colleges in California; Northwestern and the University of Chicago in the Midwest; Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth in the Ivy League. The new generation of editors sounds just as embattled and indignant as its liberal forebears who condemned the war in Viet Nam. Michael George, 21, editor in chief of Northwestern's Review (circ. 6,000), sounds the clarion call of revolt against the Establishment: "Liberals are the ruling class."
The new conservative editors vary in approach from the scholarly, even pedantic, to the strident or downright offensive. The label conservative seems to embrace as many viewpoints on campus as in society at large, ranging from Jeffersonian calls for states' and individuals' rights to Moral Majority attacks on feminism and abortion, and even some racist-tinged critiques of affirmative action. But the editors, diverse as they are, trade notes and have come to constitute an informal network. That delights Columnist William Buckley, a major patron of the Dartmouth Review and a hero to most of the rightist student editors. Buckley is enthusiastic: "I have for 30 years maintained that the genuine dissidents at liberal colleges are conservatives."
The conservative upsurge is not entirely spontaneous. Reviving the right on campus has been a deliberate goal of the Institute for Educational Affairs, a New York-based foundation, whose roster of directors, which includes Authors Irving Kristol and Michael Novak and Economist Murray Weidenbaum, looks like a Who's Who among conservatives. Funded by other foundations and by dozens of corporations, the I.E.A. since 1980 has financed academic research and has given a total of more than $100,000 to some 15 student publications, in many cases enabling their birth. A grant made last Friday will launch a paper at the University of Louisville. Says former Treasury Secretary William Simon, a co-founder of the institute: "I view this whole business as a war of ideas."