Cultivating Campus Conservatives

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 14, 2001 | by Ted Hayes

The Campus Leadership Program borrows from the radical student organizations of the sixties. But its goal is to help combat the excesses of academic liberalism.

Higher education, take notice. The Campus Leadership Program (CLP), offspring of the Leadership Institute and housed at its Arlington, Va., headquarters, is posing a challenge to "political correctness" on campuses across the country. "We are the alternative to campus liberalism," says Dan Labert, the program's national field director. "We've borrowed a page from the radical student organizations of the 1960s. They organized on campuses nationwide -- now it's our turn."

In fact, the CLP has gone well beyond the radical organizations of the sixties, say longtime campus observers. Placing a major emphasis on training, the CLP introduces its neophyte activists to all aspects of "growing" a student movement, from running a meeting to winning on-campus elections to launching conservative student newspapers, activists tell Insight. Training occurs at seminars in Arlington and at dozens of sites nationwide. "We're trying to do it right," says Rich Moha, the CLP's national operations director, citing the group's training handbook, Resource Book: A Guide for Conservative Campus Leaders. The handbook offers 235 pages of practical organizational advice, including tips on developing a tax-exempt organization, playing host to conservative speakers, recruiting members, developing fliers and posters, organizing fund raising and even creating a Web page.

"There are several basic principles that we try to follow," Moha tells Insight. "One has been to make sure real control of any campus unit remains with the leaders of that unit. We don't want CLP in Arlington to run it. Leaders are created by delegating authority."

The program also has followed the principle of cooperating with other conservative campus groups. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a campus-oriented conservative research and organizing effort based in Wilmington, Del., has provided CLP campus chapters with speakers. And, with more than 60 funded campus papers of its own, the ISI is able to step in with follow-on financial help for papers the CLP helps to start.

An early CLP focus is incorporating campus units as Sect. 501(c)3 nonprofits. "This gives our new groups a permanent structure and the opportunity immediately to attract local donations," says Alex Kauffman, a national CLP coordinator. "The nonprofit status also ensures that any new chapter will stay nonpartisan. It won't make endorsements of national or local candidates but will stay focused on campus issues."

Incorporation usually is followed by formation of a conservative campus newspaper. National headquarters offers campus chapters $500 to produce the first edition of a newspaper. It also gives practical training in newspaper publishing and writing to would-be campus journalists. "Without the CLP's training and financial support, we could never have gotten off the ground at Villanova," says Chris Lilik, a junior who started the first conservative paper at the Philadelphia university a year ago.

CLP founder Morton Blackwell, whose legendary Leadership Institute has trained conservative activists from San Diego to Volgograd, sums up the CLP idea: "Student-run, well-funded campus organizations are the most effective way to combat the current excesses of academic liberalism."

The CLP's success in establishing new campus groups suggests Blackwell's plan is succeeding. "We've been at it just four years," Labert says. "In that time, we have created 204 campus groups in 37 states. The stronger ones attract 50 or more students to weekly meetings; 34 groups have won recognition as on-campus groups; 28 have incorporated; and another 41 are in the process of doing so."

In fact, the CLP's growth rate amounts to an impressive 15 new chapters every semester, all the more remarkable for taking place on college campuses, which conservatives long have considered a liberal playground. CLP activists say the fact that campuses are so heavily liberal may work to the CLP's advantage. By providing conservative speakers and publications, the program often supplies a viewpoint that otherwise is missing. Whatever the reason, there is considerable growth by any measure, and it does not seem unrealistic when Labert says: "We want chapters in every state, on every campus."

It is not hard to understand why cultural conservatives have felt shut out of college campuses. Two decades ago, Dartmouth College began coed dormitories; today, that practice is the norm across the country. Freshmen orientation courses validating the homosexual lifestyle are commonplace. A year ago, Georgetown University -- officially a Roman Catholic school -- tolerated a reading of The Vagina Chronicles, a series of monologues extolling the virtues of female genitalia. And the university dismissed from the campus paper a student reporter who deplored the affair. This spring, Penn State University held a self-styled "Sex Faire" with explicit booths and exhibits, while Michigan State University hosted its own reading of The Vagina Chronicles.