Conservative Rebels on Campus

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

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."

Many student editors feel equally combative. Visually, their papers are often cluttered and oldfashioned, but they argue their cases with blunt headlines and florid, Buckleyesque prose. Most are far more interested in opinion than in news. Says Roger Brooks, editor in chief of Princeton's year-old Madison Report (circ. 2,500): "I believe in saying what I think." Paul Davies, president of the Stanford Review (circ. 1,000), agrees: "We are here to balance student debate." Because many papers begin as personal vehicles, some are short-lived. Those that survive may evolve: the University of Wisconsin's weekly Badger Herald (circ. 10,000) has been a conservative voice since 1969 but has gradually muted its attacks. Contends Editor John Stofflet: "Now people look to us for objective news." Occasionally, ideological zeal, undergraduate high spirits and the general absence of faculty supervision for these independent groups have led to rhetorical excesses, which have often been retracted with apologies.

At one campus the merciless vitriol of a conservative weekly has provoked an uneasy, university-wide debate about just how much free speech a civilized community can tolerate. Pervading the pages of the Dartmouth Review, founded in 1980, is a sophomoric brand of macho humor. An essay in its Oct. 18 issue spoke scornfully of a "never-never land where men are women and women are persons." The same issue contained a mock memo berating student homosexuals: "Wasn't the closet more comfortable than the trash bag? You guys could suffocate." Contends Editor in Chief E. William Cattan: "We are writing for Dartmouth students. We have to make it spicy."

Far more serious than misfired jokes is the Review's repeated charge that Dartmouth's black students expect, and get, preferential academic treatment. Last year Co-Founder Keeney Jones wrote an article assailing affirmative action in what purported to be black street slang. In its annual critique of the curriculum in September, the Review disdained giving either women's studies or black studies the detailed analysis accorded to more traditional academic departments. Asked the Review rhetorically: "If Jews or Serbo-Croatians claimed victim status, and bit people, would they get their own departments too?"

The Review's inflammatory tone suggests that the editors seek to be agents provocateurs. Fed up at last, Dartmouth's faculty of arts and sciences voted, 113 to 5, to "deplore the abuses of responsible journalism that have been a regular practice of the Dartmouth Review." College President David McLaughlin concurred. "Free expression is not a privilege, but a fundamental right," he said. "When freedom of expression is used relentlessly to attack the integrity of individuals or segments of the community, it tests to the utmost our commitment to this right."

Yale administrators tried to show similar restraint, but they now face court action after having enacted rules that could disenfranchise the staunchly anti-Soviet Yale Literary Magazine. In palmier days, the Lit, though run by undergraduates, drew contributions from such men of letters as Rudyard Kipling and Ezra Pound. But it was moribund in July 1978, when Andrei Navrozov, a June graduate, purchased the rights to the name for $1. The revived Lit published highbrow but often right-wing articles, many by its publisher's father, Soviet Exile Lev Navrozov. Critics contended that undergraduate editors held fancy titles but exerted little control; indeed, Navrozov called the Lit "an independent national quarterly." The magazine was financed with $640,000 in grants obtained from many of the same benefactors that Yale taps for its general treasury.

After prolonged internal debate, Yale ruled that to qualify to use the university's name, a college publication must give undergraduates editorial control. Navrozov sued to forestall enforcement of the rule. Taking his side was another, even more conservative Yale journal, the Free Press (circ. 10,000), a newspaper that was launched Oct. 4.

Whatever the merits of the Lit's case, Navrozov is unusual among the new campus crusaders. Hardly any come from families of even modest literary celebrity or deep political involvements. (One notable exception: Yale Free Press Publisher Charles Bork is the son of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Robert Bork, who, as President Nixon's acting Attorney General, fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Saturday Night Massacre.) Most of the right-wing student editors are white, male, middle-class products of suburbia; some receive financial aid, although their papers generally oppose federal loan programs.

So far, the campus impact of the conservative publications is hard to measure. They have not usually competed with established student papers for paid circulation; instead, most of the conservative journals are given away free to undergraduates. Despite selling ads, the papers rely on donations and on subscriptions from conservative alumni, who seek a vehicle to challenge university policies that they deem liberal.

The conservatives' victories to date have been modest. When a group of antiabortion students were refused the auspices of Princeton's women's center, the Madison Report helped lead a successful protest on their behalf. At Dartmouth, Editor Cattan cites having persuaded the college to keep the school's post office open on Saturdays. In its 13th anniversary issue in September, Wisconsin's Badger Herald self-effacingly noted its achievements in getting the university to install more pencil sharpeners and a more accessible supply of toilet paper.

In fairness, conservative publications need time to take hold. Peter Keisler, an editor of Yale's Free Press, contends that "lasting ideologies do not come overnight." A potential audience is certainly there. Notes Karen Tilbor, Princeton University's assistant dean of student affairs: "These are conservative times on campus." The problem for the right-wing press is to find a persuasive tone. Dartmouth's Review has grabbed at lapels and won attention but few friends. The question for conservative college editors is whether a more intellectual, less visceral approach can build a following and win a few victories for their cause.

--By William A. Henry III. Reported by Joelle Attinger/Boston

With reporting by Joelle Attinger

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