Bulletin #173
Subject: ON POLITICAL
REPRESSION (or " HOW THE GOALS JUSTIFY THE
METHODS ! ") : FROM THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN
INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS,
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The "free elections" in
In item A., Professor Richard Du Boff (
Item B. is a short
article by Kathy Lynn Gray, published in the Columbus Dispatch
(out of
In finally, in Item C., below, Professor Fred Lonidier (UCSD) has sent us an article from the Los
Angeles Times describing the ideological battles being fought on American
university campuses today, as neo-conservative ideologues continue to struggle
to win over student opinion at major universities across the
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Grenoble 3
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
______________________________
A.
from Professor Richard du
Boff :
Date:
Subject:
Inventing political violence
http://www.globalagendamagazine.com/2005/mahmoodmamdani.asp
Inventing political
violence
Mahmood Mamdani
America
created violent political Islam inadvertently as part of its Cold War strategy,
says Mahmood Mamdani
I was in
Why the
difference? I suggest we look at the nature of the public debate in
The post-9/11
public debate in the
Bernard Lewis,
in contrast, makes a more nuanced claim. He says that there are good secular
Muslims and bad fundamentalist Muslims, and that the west needs to distinguish
between them. He identifies a secular point of view with western culture so
completely that, for him, a secular Muslim is necessarily a westernized Muslim.
A neoconservative guru, Lewis was a major inspiration behind the Iraq War.
Their
differences aside, Lewis and Huntington share two assumptions. The first is
that the world is divided into two - modern and pre-modern. Modern peoples make
their own culture; their culture is a creative act and it changes historically.
In contrast, they assume that pre-modern peoples have an unchanging, ahistorical culture, one they carry along with them; they
wear their culture as a kind of badge, and sometimes suffer from it like a
collective twitch. The second assumption is that you can read people's politics
from their culture. I call these two assumptions Culture Talk.
The aftermath
of the Iraq War has turned into a crisis for theory. It is increasingly clear
that the designation of some Muslims as good and others as bad has little to do
with their orientation to Islam, and everything to do with their orientation to
Political
Islam
Contemporary,
modern political Islam developed as a response to colonialism. Colonialism
posed a double challenge, that of foreign domination and of the need for
internal reform to address weaknesses exposed by external aggression.
Early
political Islam grappled with such questions in an attempt to modernize and
reform Islamic societies. Then came Pakistani thinker
Abu ala Mawdudi, who placed political violence at the
centre of political action, and Egyptian thinker Sayyed
Qutb, who argued that it was necessary to distinguish
between friends and enemies, for with friends you use reason and persuasion,
but with enemies you use force.
The terrorist
tendency in political Islam is not a pre-modern carry-over but a very modern
development.
Radical
political Islam is not a development of the ulama (legal
scholars), not even of mullahs or imams (prayer leaders). It is mainly the work
of non-religious political intellectuals. Mawdudi was
a journalist and Qutb a literary theorist. It has
developed through a set of debates, but these cannot be understood as a linear
development inside political Islam. Waged inside and outside political Islam,
they are both a critique of reformist political Islam and an engagement with
competing political ideologies, particularly Marxism-Leninism.
Let us
remember that the period after World War II was one of a decades-long secular
romance with political violence. Armed struggle was in vogue in national
liberation and revolutionary movements. Many political activists were convinced
that a thoroughgoing struggle had to be armed. The development of religious
political tendencies that glorify the liberating role of violence is a
latter-day phenomenon. Rather than a product of religious fundamentalism, it is
best thought of as both religious and secular, a sign of the times.
The late
Cold War
That said, we are confronted with a singular question: How did
Islamist terror, a theoretical tendency that preoccupied a few intellectuals
and was of marginal political significance in the 1970s, become part of the
political mainstream in only a few decades? To answer it, we need to move away
from the internal debates of political Islam to its relations with official
Decolonization
reached a momentous point in 1975. The year the Americans were defeated in
The defining
feature of the new phase of the Cold War was the strong anti-war movement
within
The
administration of Ronald Reagan raised proxy war from a pragmatic response to a
grand strategy, called the Reagan Doctrine. Developed in response to two 1979
revolutions - those of the Sandinistas in
The Reagan
Doctrine also turned on a second initiative, one that involved a shift from
"containment" to "rollback", from peaceful coexistence to a
determined, sustained and aggressive bid to reverse defeats in the
Evil is a
theological notion. As such, it has neither a history nor motivation. The
political use of evil is two-fold. First, one cannot coexist with evil, nor can
one convert it. Evil must be eliminated. The war against evil is a permanent
war, one without a truce. Second, the Manichean battle against evil justifies
any alliance. The first such alliance, dubbed "constructive
engagement", was between official
"Constructive
engagement"
It is through
"constructive engagement" that official
The bitter
fruit of constructive engagement was
Constructive
engagement was a period of tutorship for official
It is worth
drawing some lessons from the history of terror after
Rollback on
a global scale: Afghanistan
The Afghan war
was the prime example of "rollback". In the history of terror during
the last phase of the Cold War, the Afghan war was important for two reasons.
First, the Reagan administration ideologized the war
as a religious war against the evil empire, rather than styling it a war of
national liberation such as that it claimed the Contras were fighting in
Second, the
Reagan administration privatized war in the course of recruiting, training and
organizing a global network of Islamic fighters against the
The narrow
theology recast Islam around a single institution, the jihad; it redefined the
jihad as exclusively military and claimed the military jihad to be an offensive
war entered into by individual born-again devotees as opposed to defence by an Islamic community under threat. The jihadi madrasahs in
Before the
Afghan jihad, right-wing political Islam was an ideological tendency with
little organization and muscle on the ground. The Afghan jihad gave it numbers,
organization, skills, reach, confidence and a coherent objective.
Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of
Government, Department of Anthropology and
______________________________
B.
from Kathy Lynn Gray :
Date:
Subject:
THE
copyright, January 2005
Legislation
that would restrict what university professors could say in their classrooms
was introduced yesterday in
Marion Sen. Larry A.
Mumper's "academic bill of rights for higher
education" would prohibit instructors at public or private universities
from "persistently" discussing controversial
issues in class or from using their classes to push political, ideological,
religious or anti-religious views.
Senate Bill 24 also
would prohibit professors from discriminating against students based on their
beliefs and keep universities from hiring, firing, promoting or giving tenure
to instructors based on their beliefs.
Mumper, a Republican, said many professors
undermine the values of their students because "80 percent or so of them
(professors) are Democrats, liberals or socialists or card-carrying
Communists" who attempt to indoctrinate students.
"These are
young minds that haven't had a chance to form their own opinions," Mumper said. "Our colleges and universities are still
filled with some of the '60s and '70s profs that
were the anti-American group. They've gotten control of how to give people
tenure and so the colleges continue to move in this direction."
Joan McLean, a
political-science professor at
"This is not
the kind of democracy we think we're spreading when we hear President Bush's
words. What we're celebrating is our ability to not control information."
Besides,
The language of Mumper's bill comes from a 2003 booklet by conservative
commentator David Horowitz that lays out how students can persuade universities
to adopt the "bill of rights." The booklet says it is "dedicated
to restoring academic freedom and educational values to
The issue has gone
national.
Horowitz created
Students for Academic Freedom, a group based in
On the other side,
the American Association of University Professors, which has thousands of
members at hundreds of campuses, argues that eliminating controversial issues
from courses waters down academic freedoms.
Mumper said he's been investigating the issue for
months and has heard of an
"I think the
bill asks that colleges and universities be fair in their approach to their education
of students," Mumper said. "They need to
have their rights defended and need to be respected by faculty and
administrators."
In a
"I see this
so-called bill of rights, the platform that he has constructed, as one that
would explicitly introduce into college and university appointments a kind of
political litmus test," she said.
Mumper said he will "push this all the
way" so that it's approved by either the legislature or by individual
universities.
When a similar
proposal was considered in the
______________________________
C.
from Professor Fred Lonidier
:
Date:
Subject: An OpEd in the L.A. Times last Friday
Brian C. Anderson
copyright, January 2005
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006149
AMID THE IVY
(Right on Campus
Conservatives begin to infiltrate the left's last redoubt)
BY BRIAN C. ANDERSON
Throughout 2003 and into
2004, a surge of protests roiled American campuses. You probably think the kids
were agitating against war in
The principle, the
protesters observed, was just that governing university admission practices: rewarding
people differently based on race. Indignant school officials charged the
bake-sale organizers with "creating a hostile climate" for minority
students, oblivious to the incoherence of their position. On what grounds could
they favor race preferences in one area (admissions) and condemn them in the
other (selling cookies) as racist? Several schools banned the sales, on flimsy
pretexts, such as the organizers' lack of school food permits.
The protests shocked
the mainstream press, but to close observers of
But the left's long
dominion over the university--the last place on earth that lefty power would
break up, conservatives believed--is showing its first signs of weakening. The
change isn't coming from the schools' faculty lounges and administrative
offices, of course. It's coming from self-organizing right-of-center students
and several innovative outside groups working to bypass the academy's elite
gatekeepers.
There have always
been conservative students on campus: More than a half-century has passed since
a just-matriculated William F. Buckley published "God and Man at
Yale," lamenting his alma mater's secularism and launching the author on
his now-legendary career. But never has the right flourished among college kids
as it does today.
The number of
College Republicans has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six
years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College
Democrats' 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). College Republicans are
thriving even on elite campuses. "We've doubled in size over the last few
years, to more than 400 students," reports Evan Baehr,
the square-jawed future pol heading the
Other conservative
organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard's has more than 100 students
blasting away) to impudent newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools
everywhere--even at
The bustle reflects
a general rightward shift in college students' views. Back in 1995, reports
UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, 66% of freshmen wanted the wealthy
to pay higher taxes. Today, only 50% do. Some 17% of students now value taking
part in environmental programs, half of 1992's percentage. Support for abortion
stood at two-thirds of students in the early 1990s; now it's just over half. A
late-2003 Harvard Institute of Politics study found that college students had
moved to the right of the
overall population, with 31% identifying themselves
as Republicans, 27% as Democrats and the rest independent or unaffiliated.
"College campuses aren't a hotbed of liberalism any more," institute
director Dan Glickman comments. "It's a
different world."
Youthful attitudes
are volatile, of course, but this rightward trend may intensify. In a mock
election run by Channel One, which broadcasts in public schools, 1.4 million
high school students re-elected George W. Bush in a landslide, with 55% of the
popular vote and 393 electoral votes--greater than the 51% of the popular vote
and 286 electoral votes he actually won.
Today's
right-leaning kids sure don't look much like the Bill Buckley-style young
Republicans of yesteryear. "Conservative students today will be wearing
the same T-shirts, sneakers and jeans that you find on most 19-year-old college
kids," says Sarah Longwell of the Delaware-based
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes the Western intellectual
tradition on campuses. Jordana Starr, a
right-of-center political science and philosophy major at Tufts, tartly adds
that you can spot a student leftist pretty fast: "They're the ones who
appear not to have seen a shower in some time, nor a laundromat."
The new-millennium
campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture, as I've found
interviewing 50 or so from across the country. A favorite TV show, for
instance, is Comedy Central's breathtakingly vulgar cartoon "
Yet the opinions of
these kids are about as far from the New York Times as one gets. Affirmative
action particularly exasperates them. Chris Pizzo, a
political science major who edits Boston College's conservative paper, the
Observer, points to wealthy Cuban-American friends from his native Florida,
"raised with at least the same advantages and in the same environment that
I was," yet far likelier to get into the top schools. Where's the justice
in that?"
Worse still, many
students argue, preferences carry the racist implication that blacks and
Hispanics can't compete on pure merit--an implication that holds minorities
back. "Affirmative action has a detrimental effect on the black community,
whether or not we're willing to admit it," says Jana Hardy, a biracial
recent Claremont McKenna grad now working in urban planning.
The war on terror,
including in
full-fledged on board with the
On cultural issues,
the students had clearly reached their own, sometimes idiosyncratic,
conclusions. Yale senior Nikki McArthur (a big Metallica
fan) is, like most of the students I questioned, ardently pro-life--"but
not because I necessarily think that an embryo is a full human being."
Rather, she argues, "I think that a culture in which abortion is widely
accepted is one in which people have a wrong understanding of children and sex.
Children should not be considered burdens." Jordan Rodriguez, a
rugged-looking Evangelical Princeton undergrad, Deke
pledge president and hyperachiever--he was varsity
baseball and editor of the literary magazine at his
Many of the students,
especially the women, value getting married and raising a family with a fervor
that would thrill the Family Research Council. "I'm an old-fashioned
girl," avers Cornell's Miss Stewart. "I think it's wonderful when a
mother can spend the majority of her time devoted to her child's early years. I
plan to do just that."
Yet for most of the
conservative students I interviewed, traditional values did not extend to
homosexuality. Though few support gay marriage, fewer still want the
Constitution amended to ban it, and most are OK with state-sanctioned civil
unions for gays. "I don't buy the prevalent argument that recognizing gay
unions would undermine the institution of marriage," says Vanderbilt
sophomore Anne Malinee, the strongly pro-life editor
of the Vanderbilt Torch, the school's conservative monthly. "Of all the
issues selected officials could be focusing on, why this?" Similarly, Bucknell history and economics major Charles Mitchell,
culturally conservative in
many respects, isn't worried about gay marriage.
"I believe that homosexuality is a sin, because that's what the Bible
says, but I also believe that if two people of the same sex love each other and
can get a priest to marry them, the propriety of that is none of the state's
business."
What accounts for
the growing conservatism of college students? After 9/11, many collegians came
to distrust the U.N.-loving left to defend the nation with vigor. As of late
2003, college students backed the war more strongly than the overall American
population. Notes Edward Morrissey, "Captain Ed" of
the popular conservative blog Captain's Quarters,
these kids "grew up on . . . moral relativism and internationalism,
constantly fed the line that there was no such thing as evil in the world, only
misunderstandings."
Suddenly, on 9/11,
this generation discovered that "there are enemies and they wanted to kill
Americans in large numbers, and that a good portion of what they'd been taught
was drizzly pap."
Yet a deeper reason
for the rightward shift, which began well before 9/11, is the left's broader
intellectual and political failure. American college kids grew up in an era
that witnessed both communism's fall and the unchained
since I was a kid," one student observed in
an online discussion. "I look around and don't see any discrimination
against minorities or women." Left-wing charges of
The destructive
effects of "just do it" values on the family are equally evident to
many undergrads, who have painfully felt those effects themselves or watched
them rip up the homes of their friends. They turn to family values with the
enthusiasm of converts. Even their support of homosexual civil unions may
spring from their rejection of the world of casual hookups, broken marriages
and wounded children that liberalism has produced. "Heterosexuals have
already done a decent job of cheapening marriage on their own," observes
Vanderbilt's Miss Malinee.
Conservative ideas
take on even greater allure for students when the authorities say they're
verboten. From pervasive campus political correctness--the unfree
speech codes, obligatory diversity-sensitivity seminars and school-sponsored
performances of "The Vagina Monologues'--to the professorate's
near-uniform leftism, with faculty Democrats
outnumbering Republicans by at least 7 to 1 (at Williams, it's 51 Dems to zero Republicans), everything aims to implant
correct left-wing attitudes in student brains.
"There's a
natural and healthy tendency among students to question the piety of their
teachers," Penn history professor Alan Kors
noted a few months back. "And for so long the pieties,
dogmas and set of assumptions being taught on college campuses have been found
on the far left." Says Daniel Flynn of the Leadership Institute, a
nonprofit that trains young conservative activists: "The intention of many
in academe is to evangelize left-wing ideas, but in effect what they're doing
is often the opposite: piquing interest in the other side."
Katherine Ernst, a
perky, blond and diminutive recent
'Oil, oil, oil,
they're poor, we take advantage of them, it's really complicated, blah, blah,
blah.' It was something that I and many other
students living in
our financial-district dorm really enjoyed," Miss Ernst says acidly.
"The worst professor I ever had, though, was for a course in
administrative law," she recalls. "Every class--no
exaggeration--included at least five references to 'Bush was selected.' "
A final straw for Miss Ernst came when a professor--"a for-real
communist"--walked out of a class he was teaching "to take part in
some stupid protest march." So there you have it, says Miss Ernst:
"You pay thousands and thousands and the prof
takes off to carry a 'no justice, no peace' sign around
right-winger?"
Bucknell grad Tom Elliot (profiled in a 2003 New
York Times magazine article on young conservatives) experienced "quite a
bit" of hostility in the classroom. "I was constantly singled out and
made to look ridiculous--responsible for the right-wing ideas being lambasted
by the professor that day," he observes. Tufts' Jordana
Starr listens to her media-and-politics professor berate conservatives week
after week: President Bush's re-election is the "apocalypse," Mr.
Bush is an evil draft dodger, ad nauseam.
The leftism that so angers these students includes the
hey-ho-Western-civ-has-got-to-go theories that inform
college courses from
coast to coast. "In too many
classrooms," says former education secretary William Bennett,
"radical professors teach their students that Western thought is suspect,
that Enlightenment ideals are inherently oppressive and that the basic
principles of the American founding are not 'relevant' to our time."
College course catalogs
often read like satires. Want to study English lit at, say,
Penn? Freshmen take introductory classes like "Secrecy and
Sexuality in the Modern Novel," taught by--no joke--Heather Love. In the
course description, Ms. Love explains that "many of the books that we
consider 'great literature' "--note the obligatory postmodern scare
quotes--"are noted as much for what they don't say as for what they
do." Deconstructing Herman Melville and other dead white males, Ms. Love
promises to uncover "what, if anything, they are hiding" about
homosexuality, pederasty and incest.
That's for
first-year students. Ms. Love's upper-level course "Theories of Gender and
Sexuality" focuses on "reproductive rights; pornography, 'sex work'
[prostitution], and free speech; . . . and transgender activism," among
other themes that seem to have zilch to do with English lit. Other English
majors get to explore "postcolonial literature" with
Want to learn
history at Brown? "Europe from Rome to the Eighteenth Century,"
taught by Prof. Amy Remensnyder, will chart "the
complex divisions" of various groups within European societies
"according to gender, class, and ethnicity," the holy trinity of
postmodern intellectuals. "In the end," says Mr. Bennett, "the
central problem is not that the majority of students are being indoctrinated
(although some are) but that they graduate knowing almost nothing at all. Or
worse still, they graduate thinking that they know everything."
A student,
conservative or otherwise, who doesn't buy into the West-is-the-worst line can
"have an awful time of it," says Harvard
junior Jordan Hylden. "It is quite difficult in
fields like literature, anthropology, the social sciences and even religion to
even be informed," he complains. "It's like an ivory echo chamber,
where only the 'right'--subversive, anti-Western--ideas get a hearing."
Small wonder that enrollments in such fields have plummeted. The percentage of
undergrad degrees in the humanities, nearly 21% in the mid-1960s, fell to 12%
or so by the '90s and has never climbed back up.
Some conservative students
stuck in a left-wing echo chamber keep their real views to themselves and
parrot the "correct" line, fearing that otherwise they'll get a low
grade. One earnest
A 2003 survey by the
Independent Women's Forum found that anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of
students had felt forced to check "their intellectual and philosophical
honesty at the door in order to get good grades." A brand-new American
Council of Trustees and Alumni survey finds that half of all students--not just
conservatives--at the top 50 colleges say that profs frequently inject their
political views into courses, and almost one-third think that they have to
agree with those views to get a good grade.
Such self-censorship
may become rarer, thanks in large part to several national organizations whose
efforts to bring diversity of thought to academe are starting to pay off. These
groups help create right-of-center student clubs, and they sponsor conservative
talks--giving students the self-assurance to express conservative views publicly
and fostering campus dialogue. "There is no coercion or imposition going
on," Bucknell's Mr. Mitchell editorialized in
the Washington Times. Rather, a demand for conservative ideas "is simply
being met by, you might say, intellectual entrepreneurs."
Perhaps most
significant is Students for Academic Freedom, founded in 2003 and already
boasting 130 campus chapters. Its key initiative is a campaign for an Academic
Bill of Rights, which enjoins universities not to deny tenure or fail to hire
teachers solely because of their "retrograde" conservative politics,
and to ensure that teachers keep their classes from becoming left-wing
propaganda sessions. "What I've set out to do is to try to restore the
educational principles that were in place before the
generation of '60s leftists infiltrated the university
and corrupted it by transforming it into an ideological platform,"
explains founder David Horowitz. Legislation enacting variations of the bill is
on the move in 19 states. In
In lobbying for the
bill of rights, SAF publicizes horror stories that its chapters gather: a
Spanish instructor telling his class, "I wish George Bush were dead";
a public policy prof telling a student headed for a
conservative conference in Washington, "Well, then, you'll probably fail
my course"; a law professor proclaiming, "We all know that the 'R' in
Republican stands for racist"; and a criminology teacher who asked
students on a test to explain why George Bush is a war criminal, and then gave
an "F" to a student who answered that Saddam Hussein, not Mr. Bush,
was the monster. Mr. Horowitz says that conservative kids have usually just
accepted such classroom demagoguery. "They're
conservative, and their disposition is to suffer: 'That's just the way colleges
are,' " Mr. Horowitz says. "What I've done
as an ex-radical is to encourage them to see the injustices done to them as
injustices--and do something about it."
Needless to say, the
university establishment is downright angry about SAF's
campaign--all the more so because it turns the left's own language of
"diversity" and "rights" against it. The liberal American
Association of University Professors, in textbook Orwellian fashion, declares
the Academic Bill of Rights a "grave threat" to academic freedom. In
The idea of
intellectual diversity seems to be catching on even where the Academic Bill of
Rights hasn't yet appeared. Consider
should be self-evident that a faculty that speaks
with unanimity on some of the most divisive issues of the day is not fulfilling
its duty."
SAF helps college
kids resist classroom demagoguery, but where can a student go for teaching that
doesn't ignore or denounce conservative ideas or traditional learning but
instead explores them sympathetically? Some students look to the new
conservative media--talk radio, Fox News Channel, the blogosphere.
"Excluding one great economics professor, I learned more from listening to
Rush Limbaugh every day than from all the NYU professors I've had," says
Katherine Ernst, not really joking. Several students told
me that they read National Review Online and
FrontPage daily as reality checks on their classes.
But if a student is
really lucky, he'll find a prof
like
survives but thrives in academe. Mr. George has
sparked passionate intellectual interest among students. "Prof. George's
stamp on our intellectual formation is unmistakable," confided one.
Students particularly admire Mr. George's approach to intellectual debate.
"For our papers," says Duncan Sahner, the
intensely serious editor of the Princeton Tory, the campus's conservative
magazine, "he stresses the need to engage in what he calls the 'strongest
possible lines of counterargument.' Straw-man parries, he says, only hurt
conservatism." Moreover, Mr. Sahner adds,
"His interactions with those who disagree with him are great examples of
professional courtesy."
Mr. George has also
helped students expand their intellectual horizons through his fast-growing,
four-year-old James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a
model of liberal education in the old-fashioned sense. It runs high-level
lectures by such conservative thinkers as Justice Antonin
Scalia and Harvard political theorist Harvey
Mansfield, as well as such notable liberal scholars as Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
and Michael Sandel. The program also enables Mr.
George to appoint half a dozen visiting
Madison Fellows,
whose ranks have included such conservative lights as political scientists
Angelo Codevilla and Hadley Arkes.
"All of a sudden," says one
Since few
schools--and even fewer elite schools--boast such profs
and programs, other national groups have rushed in to supply some of what's
missing. The Virginia-based Young America's Foundation sponsors more than 200
university lectures a year by leading conservatives such as Mr. Horowitz,
Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes and antifeminist critic Christina
Hoff Sommers. Every year, thousands of students
attend YAF's conferences on the principles of a free
society, some held at the
Reagan Ranch in
The Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, founded in 1953 but reinvigorated in recent years, is
perhaps the biggest force fighting the left's campus domination. It sponsors
hundreds of conservative campus lectures a year, rooted in "the enduring
Western intellectual patrimony" of political and economic liberty, limited
government, the rule of law, moral truth and personal responsibility. ISI's talks are usually more highbrow
than YAF's: regular speakers include classicist
Victor Davis Hanson and historian Forrest McDonald.
Another key
initiative from ISI: a series of short student guides, written by first-rate
scholars such as John Lukacs (on history) and Gerald
Bradley (on constitutional law), that show undergraduates how to educate themselves
in the traditional academic disciplines. Hundreds of thousands are now in
print. In addition, ISI provides a guide to colleges that, among other
features, warns college applicants about the schools that are particularly PC
and shows them how to find teachers committed to scholarship rather than
indoctrination. Says Roger Kimball, whose pioneering
"Tenured Radicals" exposed the left's campus stranglehold 15 years
ago: "ISI is an indispensable ally in the fight against spurious claims to
'diversity,' 'tolerance,' and 'enlightenment' in the university, while also
providing a beacon that serious students and scholars can follow with genuine
profit. As Voltaire said about another supremely important fixture in the
universe, if ISI did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it."
One of ISI's biggest boosts to campus conservatism has been to
expand the number of right-leaning student publications. For some $1 million a
year on printing costs and journalistic training, ISI now boasts 85 or so
member publications at schools ranging from elite
conservative critic Paul Cantor on popular culture, as
well as the latest installment of a satirical column written by "The
Stinky Hippy" (a recurring complaint of right-of-center college kids). An
autumn issue of the Stanford Review mock-reported on "The Penis Dialogues:
A journey of self-awakening . . . and penises"--but also editorialized with
sharp intelligence about "Musharraf's
Deception" in the war on terror. The campus left has greeted these
publications with outrage. In 2003, at
the second-best conservative student paper in
the country--published a spate of anti-PC articles, until university president
Roy Nirschel charged that the paper had "crossed
seriously over the lines of propriety and respect," "flirted with
racist and anti-Islamic rhetoric," and--you guessed it--created a
"hostile environment for our students and community." The school
froze $2,700 in campus funds granted to the paper. It was a "death blow"
for the Hawk's Right Eye, says editor Jason Mattera, silencing it for the year.
Student leftists,
sometimes with the support of school officials, regularly try to shut down or
shut up conservative student publications, practicing what civil libertarian
Nat Hentoff calls "free speech for me and not
for thee." A few years ago, for instance, Cornell's dean of students stood
side by side with leftist students as they torched copies of the Cornell
Review, which had run an article mocking Ebonics. An official university
spokesman defended the burning as "symbolic." In 2003, Campus
magazine reports, the liberal-controlled SUNY-Albany student association,
solely for political reasons, nixed student activity funds for the
right-leaning College Standard Magazine--this, after the magazine had already
faced months of harassment from the campus left, including disruptions of its
meetings by radical groups, thousands of copies stolen, and defacement of its
display stands with anticonservative threats. The magazine's staff, claiming
discrimination against their conservative ideas, won a 10-month court battle
against the school to have funding restored. Of course, conservative kids face
the same social pressures that all college students do. So how do they fare on
the campus social scene? It varies by school. Students I interviewed who
attended Southern schools said
that right-of-center kids were in the majority
and set the tone. Harris Martin, a University of Georgia history major who
estimates that over 60% of students there tilt right, says, "The culture
is a distinctly Southern conservative one--hunting, football, big trucks and
SUVs, camouflage, old baseball caps, fishing, country music and Southern
rock." At Clemson in
The more politically
correct culture prevailing at other schools, especially the Ivies, can be a
problem for conservative students. Several
But for all the
anxiety of the
and I used to spend hours watching old episodes
of The West Wing," says Yalie Nikki McArthur.
"She is as liberal as I am conservative, and we always had little
political debates during the commercial breaks."
Conservative
students must also deal with the coed dorms and hookup sex,
drink-till-you're-blitzed parties, and general civilizational
chaos of life at many schools--vividly described by author Tom Wolfe in his new
novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons"--that liberal educators abetted and
encouraged when they rejected any in loco parentis
duties decades ago and began to celebrate the idea of college being a time of
"experimentation" and "growth." For some libertarian kids
on the right, the social scene is A-OK. "Say what you will about us, we
like to party!" enthuses "conservative libertarian" Ruben Duran,
a
fair share of sex, alcohol, rock 'n' roll. Not
so much drugs, though," he adds helpfully. But for some conservative
students, especially those from religious backgrounds, the bedlam can be
unsettling.
Harvard's Jordan Hylden, a conservative Protestant, finds Mr. Wolfe's characterization
of campus life "depressingly correct." As well he might, given the
dean-supervised tailgate party for the Harvard-Yale football game this
November, so out-of-control with drunkenness, drugs and nudity that it
made headlines in the Boston Herald. "Today's university is without morals
or guiding principles, except one," Mr. Hylden
contends: "to follow in all things the ideal of 'to thine
own self be true.' Individual desires,
whatever they are, are affirmed, and the denial of
these desires, by yourself or by another person or group, is the greatest
possible evil."
Some conservative
students feel considerable pressure to "grow." Jennifer Mickel, a pretty
something like this: 'I don't have time for a
relationship, so of course I hook up.' And I can count on one hand, among the
thousands of students I've met, those who refrain from drinking
regularly."
Helping students
resist such pressures are a growing number of vigorous student religious
groups, preaching moderation. College campuses nationwide have seen a
"religious upsurge" over the last decade, the Christian Science
Monitor reports. MIT is now home to 15 Christian fellowship groups--"a
pretty stunning development for a university . . . where efficiency and
rationality are embedded in the DNA of the cold granite campus," notes the
Boston Globe, making the typical liberal assumption that one can't be both
an Evangelical Christian and rational. A new
UCLA survey found that three-quarters of college juniors say that religious or
spiritual beliefs have helped develop their identities, and 77% say that they
pray.
The upperclassman
leaders of these groups can set examples for younger students, as
simpler for us to avoid blurring the line between
acceptable and unacceptable levels of drinking, but also to make others feel
more
comfortable who might not want to drink."
Conservatives still have a long, long way to go before they can proclaim the
left's control over the campus broken. The professorate remains a solidly
left-wing body, more likely to assign Barbara Ehrenreich
than
Milton Friedman,
Michel Foucault than Michael Oakeshott, and nothing,
not even David Horowitz's indefatigable activism, is going to change that soon.
Nevertheless, thanks both to enterprising students and groups like ISI and SAF,
the left's iron hold on academe is beginning to loosen. Anyone who cares about
the education of our children--and the future political discourse of our
country--can only cheer.
_____________________
Mr. Anderson
is senior editor of City Journal, in whose Winter issue this article appears,
and author of "
Francis McCollum
Feeley
Professor of
American Studies/
Director of Research
at CEIMSA-IN-EXILE