The young and the restless

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 14, 1998 | by Eli Lehrer

The Young America's Foundation is leading the conservative charge to win the hearts and minds of impressionable college-age students. Even Washington is paying attention.

Trent Lott dashed into Room G-50 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building with his coattails flying behind him. The Senate majority leader had an appointment to address the assembled students at the Young America's Foundation annual Washington conference on a steamy summer day. It was an appointment he didn't want to miss.

Although he arrived late, Lott knew he had no reason to worry when the assembled young conservatives greeted him with a standing ovation. Concluding his speech, the senator from Mississippi walked out of the hall fulfilling as many requests for photographs and autographs as he could handle. It was rock-star treatment for a politician.

Later that afternoon, the young people at the conference -- almost all college students -- listened to speeches from many of the most prominent conservatives in Congress. Indeed, during the course of one week, nearly every well-known conservative, in and out of politics, spoke to the conference. It was a testament to the increasing influence of the conference organizers as the voice of the campus right.

The Young America's Foundation is the wealthiest and most influential conservative organization focusing on college-age students. From its modest beginnings as a student group at Vanderbilt University in 1968 to its purchase of Ronald Reagan's ranch earlier this year for about $6 million, the foundation has been an effective vehicle for taking the conservative message to American campuses. Indeed, the foundation organizes so many programs on so many campuses that it's difficult to find a conservative activist younger than 30 who hasn't had some contact with its activities.

This group began its rise to prominence when students attending a 1983 foundation conference were arrested for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Washington Metropolitan Police detained them under a law that banned demonstrations in front of embassies (but which, in practice, was used to protect only the embassies of communist countries). Some foundation leaders jumped to the students' defense, and the Supreme Court overturned the law in 1988.

Events such as this to the contrary, foundation president Ron Robinson says that the group sees itself as an outreach organization rather than an activist one. "We want to draw young people into the conservative movement," he says.

Although the two always have had separate leadership, the Young America's Foundation has an informal connection with the similarly named Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF, founded in 1960. Robinson headed Young Americans for Freedom between 1977 and 1979, and much of the foundation's board and staff worked with YAF in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Robinson says that post-Watergate campaign-finance reforms undermined YAF as a political activist organization, and that it became clear that a conservative but nonpolitical educational organization would have an easier time raising money. "It was natural for us to move on," he says.

Young Americans for Freedom still exists, although president Jon Pastore says that it essentially had collapsed in 1994 when, out of desperation, all the members of the board announced their resignations and called for a new election.

"We literally started from scratch," says Pastore. "It was so bad we didn't have a list of where our campus chapters were. There are YAF groups out there that have been going along for years without any contact with us." Indeed, YAF has not even had its own office space since 1991.

But YAF slowly has rebuilt, and its first major event since 1991 will be an October conference in California. Sources in both organizations confirm that the leaders of the Young America's Foundation and Young Americans for Freedom have met to discuss an "enhanced partnership" -- a small step short of an all-out merger -- once YAF can re-create a formal national organization.

The foundation's 1996 Form 990 information return (the last year for which complete information is available) shows a total budget of a little more than $3 million, with roughly 70 percent going to programs for college students and 30 percent to fund-raising and overhead. The largest single item -- just about half of the budget -- went for broad-based educational programs: everything from research for newsletter articles to organizing conferences. Publications took about 5 percent of the budget, while expenditures for lectures took a little more than 10 percent. Scholarships (mostly to attend the organization's conferences), overhead and research programs received the rest.

The money to buy the Reagan ranch -- known as the "Western White House" during Reagan's presidency and by far the largest expenditure in the foundation's history -- came from a bequest from Reagan friends and staunch anti-Communists John and Virginia Engalitcheff.

For his work running the foundation, Robinson received $220,654 in 1996, a $40,000 raise from his previous year's salary. Robert Gilson, an expert on corporate governance who teaches at Stanford and Columbia, says that such a salary is not atypical. "It's a bit high by some standards, but it's not really unusual for some types of political groups," he says.