"Armies of the Right: What campus conservatives learned from the 60's generation."

NY TIMES MAGAZINE ^ | MAY 23, 2003

[sdk7x7]

Written from a left-wing point-of-view, this cover article analyzes the conservative movement on today's college campuses, specifically Bucknell.

[Travis McGee]

What's the secret freeper code for accessing the NYT?

[MJY1288]

Screen name = hildabeast

Password = isaliar

[dix]

username: haroldine
password: sadierae

[somemoreequalthanothers]

I can't access the article, as one has to register for the NYT, which I will never do. I'm currently working in Lewisburg, Pa, home of Bucknell. I listen to the campus 'new rock' radio station, and it actually has a Monday program with a conservative, female, student deejay. I was pleasantly surprised.

[TheAngryClam]

UN: laexaminer
PW: laexaminer

[cgk]

Is this the article? The title is different.

The Young Hipublicans

By JOHN COLAPINTO

he temptation, upon entering Charles Mitchell's dorm room at Bucknell University, is to assume that he's kidding. The doormat features a picture of Hillary Clinton and the injunction, ''Wipe Liberally.'' A vast American flag festooned in red, white and blue Christmas lights adorns one wall, along with a faded Reagan-Bush '84 poster and a small photograph of the cowboy-hatted Gipper himself. The sole concession to any interest outside right-wing politics is a wall hanging of an African jungle scene. ''My nod,'' says Mitchell, an intense 20-year-old history major, ''to multiculturalism.''

There's an element of youthful provocation at work in all this, of course -- an awareness, on Mitchell's part, that any liberal who dares to enter here will reel back in horror. (''It's fun to freak people out,'' as he puts it.) But it would be a mistake to assume that his decor reflects only a sophomoric search for self-definition. Having just completed his sophomore year, Mitchell is a dead-serious political ideologue, a right-wing activist so effective that he has been singled out by leaders of the national movement as one of its rising young stars. This past year's editor in chief of Bucknell's conservative newspaper, The Counterweight, and a founding member of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club, he has come to this small liberal-arts college tucked amid the cornfields in Lewisburg, Pa., not solely to educate himself (he holds down a 3.9 G.P.A.), but also to spread the conservative gospel, to wage war with what he considers an egregiously liberal faculty and administration and to win the hearts and minds of his politically undecided peers. Which is why it is both a joke and not a joke when he announces on his dorm-room answering machine: ''I can't come to the phone at the moment because I'm out advancing the great conservative revolution.''

He's not alone. At campuses across the country, undergraduates like Charles Mitchell have organized for an assault against the university establishment not seen since the 1980's, when Reagan's popularity triggered a youthquake of conservative campus activism. Today's surge reflects a renewed shift pronouncedly to the right on many defining issues, after several years during the Clinton presidency when students gravitated toward more liberal political labels.

As with college conservative movements in the past, the recent wave has been fueled and often financed by an array of conservative interest groups, of which there are, today, almost too many to keep straight: Young Americans for Freedom; Young America's Foundation; the Leadership Institute; the Collegiate Network; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. These groups spend money in various ways to push a right-wing agenda on campuses: some make direct cash ''grants'' to student groups to start and run conservative campus newspapers; others provide free training in ''conservative leadership,'' often providing heavily subsidized travel to their ''publishing programs''; others provide help with the hefty speaking fees for celebrity right-wing speakers. Through these coordinated activities, these groups have embarked in the last three years on a concerted campus recruitment drive to turn temperamentally conservative youngsters into organized right-wing activists. From Maine to California, students have taken up the offer -- even at such lefty bastions as Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Students at Howard University, a black institution in Washington, have started a group that has been referred to as the ''hip-hop Republicans.'' The Campus Leadership Program has by their own count helped set up 256 conservative campus groups in less than three years. The College Republican National Committee, a group that mobilizes students to campaign, has tripled its membership since 1999 to an all-time high of 1,148 chapters.

The impact has been felt far beyond the campus quadrangles and classrooms. Scott Stewart, chairman of the College Republican National Committee says that campus conservatives were instrumental to the success of the Republican Party in the last midterm elections. ''Students provide the enthusiasm, the excitement and the work that needs to be done for free in political campaigns,'' he says, ''knocking on doors, talking to voters, passing out literature, pounding in lawn signs.'' Then there is the role, historically, that college conservatives have played in shaping Republican Party ideology. A former campus conservative, William F. Buckley, wrote the movement's Ur-text, ''God and Man at Yale.'' Published in 1951, the book attacked his alma mater for spreading ''socialist'' ideas and for its lack of religious instruction in the classroom. To help institutionalize his mission of leaching liberalism from campuses, Buckley helped create the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the first education institute devoted to turning colleges to the right. I.S.I. was one of several groups behind the campus conservative movement of the 1980's, which gave rise to Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter and Ralph Reed, all former college right-wingers who are today leaders in spreading and shaping the Republican Party message. But just how close a college conservative can get to the levers of power is suggested by the ascent of one hard-right, Nixon-loving ideologue who, in 1973, became chairman of the College Republicans and who today is credited as among the greatest influences on President George W. Bush: Karl Rove.

Continued
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[Tex_GOP_Cruz]

Great article -- originally posted in its entirety here.

[JerseyHighlander]

..."''As the conservatives have become more prominent, other students are more prone to believe that they are being indoctrinated,'' Schneider says. ''So the openness of a number of students to new ideas and new ways of looking at things has actually moved in a disturbing direction. Students are much more willing to write off something as 'liberal talk' -- oh, I don't need to think about that, that's just ideology -- as opposed to thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them.'' Kim Daubman, a social psychology professor, concurs. Recently she taught a class in which she talked about the theory that news coverage of warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the United States. ''I could see the students rolling their eyes,'' she says. ''I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh, there she goes again!'''

The fact that it took less then a full breath to fully think out and discredit your theory does not constitute a lack of thought, Professor Daubman.

[Mister Baredog]

one of several groups behind the campus conservative movement of the 1980's, which gave rise to Dinesh D'Souza, Ann Coulter and Ralph Reed, all former college right-wingers who are today leaders in spreading and shaping the Republican Party message.

A growing movement, the campuses seem to be fertile ground for some fresh thinking, it just has to be driving the liberal commie professors NUTZ to see all this happening in "their world", which they've worked so hard to keep IDEALOGICALLY PURE. This is great news! LOL!

[LiteKeeper]

SITREP

[ladyinred]

Thanks for providing the link. I really enjoyed reading that! Amazing actually.

[Humidston]

. ''As the conservatives have become more prominent, other students are more prone to believe that they are being indoctrinated,'' Schneider [economics professor] says.

What a riot! I loved this article!

[watchin]

username: liberalmedia
password: sucks

[backhoe]

I can't access the article, as one has to register for the NYT, which I will never do.

Try this- enter in each field

propaganda

[PeoplesRep_of_LA]

My favorite part of you excerp;

the book attacked his alma mater for spreading ''socialist'' ideas and for its lack of religious instruction in the classroom.

For as even handed as this pretentious John Colapinto thinks he is, Its funny, and yet sad, that you can feel the strain....the difficulty he has in even mentioning the 'S' word.

The denial runs so deep with these guys they run for the hills whenever this McCarthists, red-baiting, hate speech is used it can't be said without quotes.

[MEG33]

The Professor needs a clue.I laughed when I read that statement!Critical,complex thinking required...Ha!

[ConservativeMan55]

bump.

[reformed_democrat]

But just how close a college conservative can get to the levers of power is suggested by the ascent of one hard-right, Nixon-loving ideologue who, in 1973, became chairman of the College Republicans and who today is credited as among the greatest influences on President George W. Bush: Karl Rove.

Better a Nixon-loving ideologue than a Clinton-kneepad recipient.

[BucknellConservative]

The DJ for that Monday program on WVBU is in fact Allison Kasic, who is pictured and featured in the NYT.