Papers Proliferate : The Right Presses Case on Campus

After a quarter-century of protest rallies on campus, a very unusual thing happened a few weeks ago at UC Berkeley. A student-run newspaper printed an editorial in praise of campus police and their handling of demonstrations and crime.

“Thank you for not protesting your perpetual mistreatment,” editors of the California Review declared to the pleasantly surprised police force. “You deserve better!”

The monthly paper was making its debut as a conservative voice at a school usually considered a center of liberal thought. In the process, it was also joining a growing number of journals nationwide that are challenging the notion that campus publications are almost by their nature left of center.

Shift in Views

In part, the publications reflect a shift among college students: As a group, they are more diverse politically than a generation ago, and young conservatives are much more vocal in opposing what they say is the overwhelmingly liberal influence of college professors and administrators.

But the recent growth in the numbers of such papers also reflects a concerted effort by a group of leading conservatives with headquarters in Washington.

“These are alternatives to the mainstream campus press, which is typically left of center,” says Leslie Lenkowsky, president of the Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA), which offers money, advertising and encouragement to a loose network of publications at 43 American colleges and universities.

Nationally, the best-known paper is the pugnacious Dartmouth Review, which has been battling the administration of that New Hampshire college in an ugly dispute involving charges of racism, anti-Semitism and censorship. In California, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC San Diego, Occidental College and San Jose State all have such papers.

Liberal Counterattack

The IEA--founded by such conservatives as writer Irving Kristol and former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon--has been successful enough to prompt concerns of undue influence as well as a liberal counterattack. Some colleges complain that the publications, egged on by the older conservatives to promote their own ends, are purposefully disruptive and promote intolerance.

For their part, some of the conservative student editors say they themselves are the victims of intolerance and censorship. Such a charge carries special sting at institutions that pride themselves as centers of free intellectual discourse.

“Supposedly what they were fighting for in the ‘60s was the free speech movement,” said Marc Thiessen, editor in chief of the Vassar Spectator. “Today free speech exists on college campuses for everyone but conservatives.”

At Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the student government cut off funds last semester to the Spectator for its ridiculing of a black student who allegedly made anti-Semitic remarks. At the University of Virginia, the conservative magazine recently won a fight to retain its grant from the student council over charges that the monthly is too political. Elsewhere, bundles of the conservative papers are sometimes dumped into trash bins and shouts of “fascist” sometimes tail their writers.

The Dartmouth Review, a 9-year-old weekly, is fighting the college over the suspension of two student editors for their alleged harassment of a black professor. Adding to the dispute were an article and cartoon last semester likening Dartmouth’s president, who is Jewish, to Hitler.

Most of the other conservative papers are milder and some even criticize the Dartmouth Review’s abrasive tactics as needlessly offensive. But as proud children of the Reagan era, most of the editors take on provocative issues, attacking ethnic studies, affirmative action in college admissions, school funding for gay groups and any changes in curricula viewed as moving away from classic texts of Western culture.

“If people ignore us, or just disagree with us, that will be fine,” said Phaedra Fisher, a senior from Michigan who is editor in chief of the new UC Berkeley monthly. “As long as they let us state our piece.”

IEA Aid Expanded

The IEA cites the importance of making such views known as reason for its aid, which began on a small scale in 1980 and was greatly expanded in 1987. Through the group’s Collegiate Network, campus papers received a total of about $100,000 in grants last year, plus about $30,000 in shared advertising from companies known for supporting conservative causes. The network now holds seminars about newspaper production, offers editorial cartoons and columns and has a toll-free hot line for advice.

Alarmed liberal activists began a counter program two years ago. The Center for National Policy, a Washington think tank chaired by former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, helps about 20 liberal and progressive publications at campuses such as Harvard, Columbia and the University of Texas.

“The conservatives are so very well funded, it was becoming a one-sided debate,” said Amy Weiss, who coordinates the liberal aid to college papers. Last year, that aid totaled about $10,000--a tenth of the IEA donations.

Tom Rolnicki, executive director of the Associated Collegiate Press, a nonpolitical organization that monitors student newspapers and runs contests for them, said he too is troubled by the amount of conservative donations. “It gives those papers an unfair advantage. But on the other hand, many of the other campus papers are strongly supported by the institutions and are perceived as liberal,” he said.

Some college administrators and liberals were further alarmed when Simon, in an article published last summer in the Wall Street Journal, called on alumni to give money to conservative student papers instead of to their colleges. There is no clear evidence that Simon’s advice had any effect on the schools’ fund raising, but it certainly gave the publications a boost.

At Dartmouth, the Review has garnered so much financial support from alumni and prominent conservatives, including author William F. Buckley Jr., that it doesn’t need money from IEA anymore, though the paper is active in the network. “You don’t have to read between the lines to see where they are getting their money and their ideas--from right-wing organizations,” said Alex Huppe, a spokesman for Dartmouth President James Freedman.

Support From Institute

Lenkowsky, who is a former U.S. Information Agency official, and conservative student journalists insist that IEA does not dictate editorial contents. In most cases, the network’s funds constitute less than half of the journals’ budgets, they stress.

The only daily paper in the conservative network, the Badger Herald at the University of Wisconsin, even endorsed Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in last year’s presidential election as more likely to trim the national deficit.

“Most people on campus were impressed we weren’t just little Republican robots,” said Editor John Zipperer. His paper, he said, gets a few hundred dollars a year in advertising from the network and, unlike many of the other conservative papers, tries to restrict opinion to the editorial pages.

“We are doing this because we want to do it, not because conservative adults are compelling us to be conservatives,” explained Rob Kelner of the 2-year-old Princeton Sentinel, a biweekly. “They are helping to provide the means to help us produce a newspaper. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Competition of Ideas

At Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., where there is a network paper, journalism professor George Harmon said he sees the spread of conservative publications as healthy. “I think the competition is good on the campus,” explained Harmon, chairman of the nonprofit corporation that runs the mainstream daily. He predicted that more alternative papers of all stripes will start up throughout the country as computer technology lowers the costs of production.

Kenneth C. Green, associate director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which surveys student attitudes nationally, said the conservative publications are “a very interesting phenomenon and reflective of national politics.”

He stressed that the biggest shift in students’ self-described political views over the last 20 years has been from liberal to middle of the road, not to conservative. But conservatives are clearly “making a concerted effort to be much more vocal, much more influential,” he said, and there is evidence that professors are more liberal than their students now.

Some of the journals show up at surprising places. At UC Santa Cruz, regarded by some as a hippie holdout, the Redwood Review considers itself “the only alternative voice in entire Santa Cruz County” and closely covers municipal elections, Editor-in-Chief Allison Turner said. The conservative Review prints ads for Army officer training programs, which are banned by the regular campus newspaper.

According to UC Santa Cruz student body President Kyle Arndt, the Review “reflects an increasing diversity on the campus as the kind of students attracted to Santa Cruz may change. That’s not to say we are going to support Reagan 95.5% in an election, but you really get the feeling the place has changed. There is a diversity of opinion and that is real interesting.”

A reading of several issues of 20 of the network papers shows a range in tone from moderate Republicanism to pure libertarianism, sometimes in the same issue. Some come out regularly; some when study schedules and monies permit. Some are slick, well-written journals; some are the haphazard products of undergraduate enthusiasm and dormitory word processors.

Most of the publications carry articles supporting the Contras in Nicaragua and advertisements asking for donations to the Oliver North Defense Fund. William J. Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education and now the anti-drug czar, is clearly a hero to the conservative student editors. So is Allan Bloom, whose best-selling book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” criticized colleges for abandoning classics and traditional values.

Other role models are R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor in chief of the American Spectator, and Buckley, editor in chief of National Review. Thus, many of the campus papers are called Review or Spectator and resemble one of those two conservative publications; the young writers aspire to jobs there.

Yet their main focus now is on campus and local issues.

The Stanford Review, for example, helped sponsor a campus visit last year by Bennett, who sharply attacked Stanford’s faculty for changing the required freshman course on Western culture so it reflected achievements of minorities and women.

Variety of Issues

The new UC Berkeley paper supported the university’s controversial plan to build dormitories at Peoples Park, a landmark of radical protests. The UC San Diego journal, also called the California Review, ridiculed the modernist architecture on campus. The Cornell Review passionately defended fraternities. The Northwestern Review devoted much of a recent issue to arts in the Chicago area.

In its March issue, the Princeton Tory, one of two conservative publications at Princeton, examined 1960s radicalism. “It’s one thing to like the music and clothing of a generation. . . . It’s quite another to adopt a generation’s ideals and tactics, especially when those ideals and tactics have proven empty and ineffective,” wrote Tory Editor Kim Redlinger.

A few, following Dartmouth’s Review, have sharply criticized individual teachers’ methods and ideology. But according to Anne Francke, an official of the American Assn. of University Professors, the conservative publications as a whole “haven’t caused a ruckus in the faculty world.”

At Occidental College, a conservative quarterly called the Right Side was founded last year and, in an attempt to attract more writers and readers, the name was changed last semester to the Free Thinker. The paper has applied for an IEA grant and, meanwhile, has received and printed some network advertising, including Coors beer spreads.

However, Occidental forbids advertisements for alcoholic beverages in any campus publication and school officials say the Free Thinker could face trouble if the beer advertisements appear again. Andrew Bywaters, the student editor of the Free Thinker, said he is going to fight that policy.

“They say there are no ideological reasons behind that rule. I tend to doubt that,” said Bywaters, a sophomore.

Heated Disputes

At a few other colleges, disputes involving conservative papers have been more bitter.

In January, 1988, the Northwestern Review printed an editorial against celebrating the birthday of assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. According to the editorial, King’s legacy brought “immense harm to American society, especially blacks, for it has left the U.S. more racially polarized than in 1950.” The editorial triggered angry letters and a protest rally.

The Student Press Law Center in Washington, a nonpartisan organization that works on First Amendment court cases, says conservative papers, especially those at Vassar and Dartmouth, have faced censorship. “Fighting racism is being used as a motivation for censoring college newspapers,” said Mark Goodman, center executive director. “We certainly appreciate the serious problem racism poses. We feel censorship is not the proper response to that.”

And alumni, usually oblivious of many undergraduate concerns and journalism, have been drawn into and divided over the situations at Vassar and Dartmouth.

The Vassar Spectator used to get a campus office and about $10,000 a year from the student government but lost that last fall after refusing to kill a controversial issue. That issue carried a feature called “Hypocrite of the Month,” which sarcastically lambasted a black student who had made obscene and anti-Semitic comments to a Spectator writer at a reception for the journal, although the black student later privately apologized to college officials. The black student’s face was shown in a mug shot that reminded some readers of a criminal wanted poster.

Harassment Seen

“It seemed to some that the Spectator was harassing him as if he was a criminal,” said Dixie Sheridan, the college’s vice president for college relations. Student leaders said the item was libelous.

Editor-in-Chief Thiessen said the Spectator, which had been a monthly, was not able to put out another issue until December. But now, he said, the paper is back on track, with the help of a $3,000 IEA grant and alumni donations.

The Dartmouth Review has had a reputation for offending people since its brutal parody of black ghetto English caused an uproar in 1982. The current imbroglio began in February, 1988, when the paper printed what it said was a transcript of a secretly taped lecture of music professor William Cole, whom the Review had criticized in the past. In that article, Cole, who is black, was quoted as using obscene, rambling language and calling whites “honkies.” Soon afterward, four Review staffers came to Cole’s classroom in what they said was an attempt to interview Cole. The classroom visit became an ugly confrontation.

The college suspended two of the students from school for 18 months and gave the other two lesser punishments. Big name conservatives rushed to the students’ help. In January, a New Hampshire judge ordered the two most severely disciplined students reinstated until the matter can go to a full trial.

Censorship Denied

Huppe, the campus spokesman, said Dartmouth is not trying to censor the Review. “The problem Dartmouth had with the students at the Review is their anti-social behavior and vitriolic ad hominem attacks on members of our community,” he said.

Most editors at other conservative college papers defend the Dartmouth Review’s right to print whatever it pleases. But some worry that the Collegiate Network might be hurt by the furor.

Eric Lidicker, managing editor of the Texas Review at the University of Texas in Austin, said the Dartmouth Review is sometimes “needlessly inflammatory and not thought out.” And, in what might be considered the ultimate put-down among conservative collegians, he accused the Dartmouth paper of “using tactics of the left.”