Conservatives Offer Guides to Colleges : Education: Two books weed out schools with non-Western and feminist leanings. Critics say the lists lack balance.

In the ongoing battle over the future of American academia, the conservative movement is about to launch new weapons: guidebooks to help prospective college students choose a school.

Both William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine and the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, whose founders include former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and conservative scholar Allan Bloom, are publishing books that purport to lead students to solid, traditional educations. The authors claim that too many campuses offer poor teaching, foster a radical left atmosphere and neglect Western civilization studies.

The guidebooks, said to be the first of their type, are sure to raise controversy because they urge students to confront issues of free speech, affirmative action, ethnic studies and feminism when they shop for a college. The guides already are adding to the debate over whether colleges should be rated at all.

The National Review publication, which is to arrive in stores in a few weeks, names what it calls the 50 best liberal arts schools in the nation. Its criteria are requirement of studies in the classics or so-called Great Books, an accessible faculty and “the quality of intellectual environment.” Critics say the list is eccentric and heavily weighted toward schools with ties to conservative Protestantism, the Roman Catholic Church or the Republican Party.

In California, only Claremont McKenna College, Pepperdine University and tiny Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula received the nod, eliciting mixed feelings from the colleges that were snubbed. Despite its radical past, Columbia College in New York is the only Ivy League institution listed--because of its strong core curriculum in the classics. St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the College of William and Mary in Virginia are the only state-funded schools included because many others allegedly are too impersonal or politicized.

Some of the 50 institutions chosen--the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, Claremont McKenna and Davidson College in North Carolina, among them--rank high in supposedly nonpolitical guidebooks such as the one produced by U.S News & World Report.

But Grove City College in Pennsylvania, on the National Review list, is less known nationally for its academic reputation than for its court battles with the federal government over the school’s refusal to sign compliance forms against sex discrimination. Some liberals may wonder if Boston University is worthier than neighboring Harvard or if Boston’s president, John Silber, who is known for conservative political stances and recently lost a race for Massachusetts governor, was the reason the school was chosen.

Charles Sykes, co-author of “The National Review College Guide” (Wolgemuth & Hyatt Publishers Inc.), predicted in a telephone interview from his Milwaukee home that his readers will be parents and students “who hear the stories about mass classes, teaching assistants who don’t speak English, the political correctness required on campuses--but had no place to turn to find out what to do about it.”

Such concerns cut across political lines because “quite a few people who think of themselves as liberals suddenly undergo deathbed conversions when writing out the tuition check,” said Sykes, who won attention two years ago with his book “ProfScam,” an excoriating critique of the American professoriate.

His guidebook partner was Brad Miner, literary editor at the National Review. “There is a greater consciousness in this country that the environments on campuses have changed to the point that there is great confusion as to which school is safe . . . places where your kids are not going to go as a Young American for Freedom and come back after a semester a Marxist,” Miner said in a telephone interview from his New York office. But he and Sykes insisted that they had not used a political litmus test in choosing colleges.

Still, their book is sprinkled with criticisms of schools with feminist programs, schools where ethnic studies classes are required and those where students can be punished for speech deemed racist or sexually harassing. It is no surprise that Stanford University is not listed; much to the horror of conservatives like Bennett, Stanford broadened freshman humanities requirements to include non-Western works two years ago. Also missing is Dartmouth College, where administrators have called a conservative student newspaper anti-Semitic.

Dartmouth spokesman Alex Huppe said the National Review book may help some families, but he called the choices of schools “an eccentric list created by people with a political agenda.” Huppe said it is hard to argue against the University of Chicago, Columbia, Davidson or St. John’s in Maryland, but those schools seem to have been chosen, he added, “to pepper the list with just enough first-rate schools to give it a little bit of credibility.”

Jonathan Knight, an official with the American Assn. of University Professors, has publicly debated Sykes over the author’s past writings that depict faculty as uncaring about students and passionate about trivial research. Knight, who has not read the guidebook but was told of the colleges praised by the National Review list, commented, “Some are fine institutions. But the striking thing about the list is what is left out.”

In California, UC campuses were eliminated because of their large class sizes and emphasis on research. But so were Pomona and Occidental colleges, which pride themselves on student-teacher contact but also stress non-Western studies. Admissions officials at the schools say that some people on campus are probably pleased not to have received a National Review stamp of approval.

On the other hand, Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula is delighted with the attention and hoped-for boost in admission applications, according to James Twyman, the school’s director of public affairs. “It’s quite a distinction for the college to be included,” he said. The Catholic-affiliated school has 196 students and offers a very rigorous program in reading the “Great Books,” from Homer and Plato to Goethe and Freud.

At 851-student Claremont McKenna, spokesman Robert Daseler predicted that the campus response to being named in the guidebook will be divided. “To the extent that high-quality students who are conservative may want to go to CMC, that’s great exposure. . . . But to the extent that it may reinforce an image that we are a Republican school or a conservative school, that concerns us. We don’t think of ourselves as an institution with any ideological fix.”

Claremont McKenna specializes in economics and public affairs and, the guidebook notes, has prominent conservative scholars on faculty.

The other California college on the National Review list is Pepperdine, a 3,300-student university in Malibu affiliated with the evangelical Church of Christ. According to Sykes and Miner, Pepperdine’s “sun, sand, and surf image . . . could not be more misleading.” Pepperdine’s undergraduate Seaver College is praised for its requirements in literature, Western civilization, American history and religion.

The inclusion of some schools may shock traditional National Review fans. But Sykes and Miner warn potential conservative freshmen that they will need “guerrilla student” skills to survive at Columbia and that it may “become quite nauseating . . . trapped in close proximity with the various New Age agonizers” at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota.

Meanwhile, the Madison Center, a Washington-based think tank that helps support conservative college student newspapers around the nation, is expected to publish a rival guidebook in summer. It will list colleges that conservatives like and dislike, based on educational traditions and ethical and social climates, according to the center’s executive vice president, Charles Horner.

“It’s perfectly correct to say all colleges are going to hell. But after that, students need to know how to decide between Institution X and Institution Y and which is in a condition closer to perdition,” Horner said. He declined to reveal which colleges will be critiqued.

With or without a political slant, the growing trend toward ranking colleges in guidebooks is debated. For example, the U.S. News & World Report guide was much criticized for ranking schools based on surveys of college presidents. Two years ago, that guide was changed to include more objective criteria such as admissions selectivity, financial resources, student-teacher ratios and dropout rates. But many schools, especially the losers, still complain that such rankings lead students to colleges just because of name cachet.

Frank Burtnett, executive director of the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors, said his group discourages the use of any guides that are not comprehensive. “We find that any kind of short list can be as narrow as the 30 best places to party. It’s difficult to be fair,” he said.

Moreover, guidebooks with conservative or liberal slants may restrict young people at a time when they should be widely exploring their options, Burtnett said from his office in Alexandria, Va. “Students need to take their blinders off in choosing a college,” hesaid.

Conservatives say that their two new books will counterbalance what they allege is liberal bias in some popular guidebooks such as “The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges,” compiled by the Yale Daily News. But Anne Savarese, the book’s editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York, denies that.

“We try to evaluate the school, not the politics,” she said. For example, the entry about Oral Roberts University, the evangelical school in Oklahoma, makes it clear that a liberal student would not be happy there, according to Savarese. “I don’t believe it’s sarcastic. It might be a bit flippant,” she added, “but it tries to be responsible.”

COLLEGE GUIDEBOOK

The National Review College Guide’s choice of the top liberal arts schools in the U.S.

Alabama

Birmingham-Southern

College

California

Claremont McKenna College

Pepperdine University

Thomas Aquinas College

Georgia

Oglethorpe University

Illinois

University of Chicago

Wheaton College

Indiana

Hanover College

University of Notre Dame

Wabash College

Kentucky

Asbury College

Centre College

Transylvania University

Maryland

Mount Saint Mary’s College

St. John’s College*

St. Mary’s College of

Maryland

Massachusetts

Boston University

Michigan

Calvin College

Hillsdale College

Hope College

Minnesota

Gustavus Adolphus College

Saint John’s University /

College of Saint Benedict

St. Olaf Collge

Mississippi

Millsaps College

New Hampshire

Saint Anselm College

Thomas More College

New Mexico

St. John’s College*

New York

Columbia College

Houghton College

Union College

North Carolina

Davidson College

Ohio

Franciscan University of

Steubenville

Pennsylvania

Grove City College

Saint Vincent College

Rhode Island

Providence College

South Carolina

Furman University

Wofford College

Tennessee

Rhodes College

University of the South

Texas

Baylor University

University of Dallas

Southwestern University

Trinity University

Utah

Brigham Young University

Virginia

Hampden-Sydney College

Lynchburg College

Washington and Lee

University

College of William and Mary

Washington

Gonzaga University

Whitman College

Wisconsin

Lawrence University

* The same school at two locations.