Under the right's wing: how the conservative press is recruiting and training its own - conservative college newspapers

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1996 by Thomas Toch

The Dartmouth Review, the rancorous, ultra-conservative Ivy League student newspaper, has been grabbing headlines for a long time. Back in 1988, "60 Minutes" traveled to the Hanover, NH., campus to report on the paper's racially tinged confrontation with an African American professor over the quality of his teaching methods--an incident that led to the university's suspension of three Review editors for invasion of privacy and disorderly conduct. What's received less public attention is that conservative organizations have spent millions of dollars in recent years cloning the Dartmouth paper at over 100 top-ranked colleges and universities. And the papers are not merely carrying the right's banner into campus debates. They are turning out a new generation of conservative thinkers and writers who are taking up high-profile posts in conservative public policy circles.

Past editors of the papers include many of the rising stars at the think tanks, journals, and other institutions that shape the right-of-center agenda inside the Beltway. Among them are the Vassar Spectator's Marc Thiessen, now Jesse Helms's press spokesman at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; the Wesleyan Review's Matthew Rees, a staff writer at The Weekly Standard; the Virginia Advocate's Rich Lowry, the national political writer at the National Review; the Michigan Review's Jonathan J. Miller, vice president of the Center for Equal Opportunity; the Northwestern Review's Lynne Munson, recently Lynne Cheney's top staffer at the American Enterprise Institute and now in the policy office of the Dole campaign; the Princeton Sentinels Ruth Shalit, an associate editor for The New Republic, and the University of Iowa's Campus Review columnist David Mastio, now an editorial writer and op-ed page editor at USA Today. At 29, Theissen is the oldest of the group.

Driving the conservative student newspaper movement are some of the nation's biggest right-leaning foundations. The single largest funder is the New York-based John M. Olin Foundation. Endowed by a firearms fortune, Olin spends about $200,000 a year m support of conservative campus journalism as part of its extensive funding of conservative causes. The foundation also bankrolls the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, and the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative college professors. And right-wing commentators William Bennett (the John M. Olin fellow at the Heritage Foundation), Robert Bork, and David Brock have written books under Olin grants, as has Dinesh D'Souza, the best-selling culture critic who helped launch the Dartmouth Review a decade ago. Says James Piereson, Olin's executive director, of the foundation's campus newspaper crusade: "We're fighting a war of ideas. We want to reach the nation's future leaders." It's a war, conservatives contend, that pits the conservative David against the liberal Goliath.

But while mainstream student papers outnumber their conservative counterparts, the financial muscle behind the right's campus crusade belies the image of conservative student scribes as poor underdogs. Other notable backers include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a funder of David Brock's attacks on Anita Hill ("a little bit nutty and little bit slutty"); the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a major benefactor of right-wing think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation; and the Adolph Coors Foundation.

The bulk of foundation donations are funneled through conservative tax-exempt organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc., a non-profit conservative advocacy group located outside Wilmington, Delaware. Headed by former Reagan White House policy guru T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., the ISI runs the Collegiate Network, an alliance of 56 conservative campus papers. With over $300,000 a year from Olin, Scaife, and other foundations, the Collegiate Network works to launch new publications and strengthen existing ones.

The Network's financial largesse is crucial. Member papers receive grants as large as $3,000 a year, and with the low cost of desktop publishing, the cash goes a long way. But the organization's contributions go beyond the purely financial. The Network publishes a 92-page guide, "Start the Presses!," offering publishing novices advice on topics ranging from news gathering to ad sales. It also sponsors two, expenses-paid editors' conferences a year; maintains e-mail and 800-number phone links to the Network's staff, and provides a steady flow of story ideas. Its latest offering: a site on the World Wide Web, where a number of its member papers are available electronically.

Most of the new conservative papers publish monthly, are free, and are distributed alongside "official" student publications in dorm lobbies, student unions, libraries, and other common areas. Their mainstream rivals frequently have larger press runs and publish more often, usually daily or weekly. But the conservative papers attract readers nonetheless--not because today's students are more conservative; surveys reveal that they aren't. Rather, the papers are a presence on their campuses because they challenge the prevailing Zeitgeist on a range of emotional issues. They are hard to ignore.