The Camel's Nose: The Conservative College Press

by Benjamin Kepple

“They stole the entire distribution run,” Avik Roy says, his voice still lacerated by disbelief. Roy, a medical student at Yale University and editor of Light and Truth, one of two conservative student publications at the school, had overseen this year's distribution of the paper's freshman-orientation issue on the morning of the first day that new students were allowed on campus. By that afternoon, Light and Truth was gone—each copy methodically plucked from freshmen mailboxes.

Roy ordered that more copies be distributed the next day. “They were stolen again,” he says. “This time by noontime.” The second theft was so well-thought out that the papers were gone by the time the students distributing them had stuffed copies into mailboxes in the freshmen dormitories, gone upstairs, and come down again.

“Someone had been tailing them. It was very strange,” Roy says.

What had Light and Truth done to incur the thieves' wrath?

“[They] didn't like the fact that, in one article, we criticized a safe-sex program” at Yale's new student orientation, Roy explains. “It turned out it was probably by a group of freshmen counselors,” Roy says, who were annoyed with Light and Truth's coverage of the program.

And who sanctioned this theft, which resulted in the loss of 700 issues costing approximately $2,500 to publish, not to mention the loss of time that the staff spent working on the issue?

A Yale University dean. Head of one of the school's residential colleges, and whom Roy describes as “dogmatic and inexperienced,” she gave the thumbs-up to the freshmen counselors' theft. “We pointed out what was going on at Yale,” Roy says. “That's why the issues were stolen.”

Of course, censorship and intimidation aren't restricted to New Haven. Conservative student newspapers are routinely trashed. In the past year alone, the offices of the Northwestern Chronicle were vandalized, its computers were stolen, and its issues were destroyed—a campaign of radical harassment that was topped off by having the student government officially derecognize the paper. The Cornell Review had two of its issues burned by angry campus radicals, while Cornell's administration stood idly by—and even defended the destruction as “free speech.” Amherst's student government defunded the conservative Amherst Spectator last year, and a member of Brandeis University's student government physically threatened the editor of that school's conservative publication, Freedom Magazine.

Even disturbingly personal death threats won't be enough justification for a University president to help you if you're a conservative activist. Berin Szoka and Jay Strader, two Duke University students who are now editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively, of the Duke Review, got a yawn out of the administration when Strader told Duke University president Nan Keohane of the threats made against them this past April. “It's probably just a very scary way of blowing off steam,” she said dismissively.

While these incidents may at first glance seem to be yet another chapter in the story of the radical left's long march through American college campuses, the truth is that these acts are actually desperate attempts to derail a thriving, if outnumbered, conservative movement, and specifically to put out of business the conservative newspapers which are one of that movement's most dramatic success stories. Conservative college newspapers have appeared and vanished since the 1950s, but, with the exception of the 1960s-era The Alternative (now the American Spectator), the older generation of newspapers was unable to gain a permanent foothold. Yet, over the past 20 years, a modern-day movement of conservative collegiate newspapers has spread to more than 70 of the nation's top colleges and universities, from Harvard in the east to the University of Washington in the west. These papers are frequently the campus focus point for energizing and mobilizing conservative students. Even more important, these papers articulate conservative ideas to all members of the student body and are the one reliable source—administrations long since having capitulated—for exposing the corruptions of political correctness, which would otherwise take place in darkness. These conservative papers have also produced a number of bright young writers and thinkers who have energized the national conservative movement.

Stan Ridgley is one of those veterans. Probably the foremost authority on the conservative collegiate press, Ridgley has been involved with the movement since 1989, when he founded the Duke Review. In 1995, he became executive director of the Collegiate Network, the voluntary, national association of 71 conservative papers (of which, to declare an interest, I am a regional director), and since then, he's been an important guiding figure to the movement.

“A lot of administrators and faculty pay lip service to the marketplace of ideas,” he says. “But in reality, honest discussion on premises is not possible...There is a `correct' position to take on the college campus on every hot-button issue.... The university actually tries to inculcate this. It will not allow honest disagreement, no matter how well thought out and no matter how well proven.”

There's reason for this over-reaction, Ridgley says. “When common sense begins to intrude—well, once you allow the camel's nose in a tent, soon he'll take up the entire tent.”

In the early days, this conservative press coexisted semi-peacefully with the radical outposts on campus. Tod Lindberg, who is now the editor of Policy Review, the flagship publication of the Heritage Foundation, founded Midway magazine in the spring of 1979 with his friend, John Podhoretz—who is now editorial page editor at the New York Post.

“We have somewhat of a different story to tell,” Lindberg says. “John was writing for the Chicago Maroon, the local student paper,” an endeavor that was going smoothly. Chicago wasn't a place where political correctness was a problem, he notes. “We just thought we had an interesting magazine project to run.”

While Midway—which changed its name to Counterpoint in the fall of 1979 (the University objected to Midway because it had a book imprint of that name)—was able to get some advertising revenue, “the first two issues were subsidized by the Podhoretz and Lindberg families,” he recalls.

During that time, they sent off an issue to Irving Kristol, then with the Institute for Educational Affairs, who asked the pair if they would like to receive a grant to help defray publishing costs. They said no.

“We tried to make a go of it,” Lindberg says, but after the second issue it became clear that the Podhoretz and Lindberg families were unwilling to further subsidize the venture. That led to Podhoretz writing back to Kristol to take him up on his offer.

One impetus for their acceptance of the grant was leftist response to an article by Roger Kaplan published in Counterpoint entitled “Homosexuality and Gay Tyranny.” That led to the first boycott of a conservative collegiate newspaper. “The local campus gay-rights organization found the piece to be offensive, and so they mobilized to talk to our advertisers and suggested this was not something they should want to help fund,” Lindberg says.

But once outside financing was secured, Counterpoint continued to push its wares in the marketplace of ideas at the University of Chicago. The magazine itself, Lindberg says, was a more serious journal, as opposed to a hard-hitting, brash newspaper.

“Possibly, with the exception of the Roger Kaplan piece, the magazine did not try to be anything except serious,” he explains. Counterpoint was not, he says, a magazine that engaged in “willful provocation.”

But that can't be said for many of the newspapers that would come after Counterpoint. The journals to come had a tone ranging from the extremely serious, as seen in Eutopia (a lay journal of Catholic thought at the Catholic University of America) to the take-no-prisoners reporting style and polemics present in the Cornell Review. It was actually this latter approach that ultimately seized the day. The best known of these conservative papers and the one that set the tone for those that appeared in the '90s was The Dartmouth Review, whose combative nature put it in the forefront of the news and on 60 Minutes. The Review, founded in 1980, pioneered the brash, in-your-face style that has infuriated its critics and even made its off-campus backers, normally supportive without hesitation, occasionally leery.

Dinesh D'Souza, currently a Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute and author of Illiberal Education, The End of Racism, and most recently a biography of Ronald Reagan, was one of the founders of the Review, and eventually became the Review's editor.

“Many of the deans and administrators felt frustrated with the Review because it was kind of a weekly sledgehammer,” he recalls. “Dartmouth is a small community, and the staff on the Review ... had the inspiration that the way to have an impact is to take deans and administrators and put their picture on the front page.”

It didn't take long for the Review to make its mark, whether it was through what it wrote or what its members did. In 1981, according to the Washington Post, Dartmouth College held a Veterans Day “consciousness-raising” session that involved faculty, administrators, and children staging a mock nuclear explosion on Dartmouth Green, the center of campus. Ben Hart, another founder of the Review, and his friends demonstrated against this by draping an American flag from their dorm room window, blasting the marches of John Philip Souza, and drinking brandy.

A little less than a year later, Hart was distributing issues of the Review when he was involved in an altercation with Samuel Smith, the then 53-year-old associate alumni fund director for Dartmouth College.

Hart had been distributing the issues from dorm to dorm when he came upon Smith. Smith informed him that he could not distribute the Review to the dorms; Hart replied that if he didn't like it, he shouldn't read it. Then, D'Souza recalls, Smith “jumped him from behind and grabbed him by the neck.”

Hart, in an effort to break free, ended up getting Smith in a headlock, at which point Smith bit him in the chest. Doing so earned Smith three false teeth, a fine, a week's suspension from work, and probation. Hart got off much easier. D'Souza recalls that Ben's father, Dr. Jeffrey Hart, a Dartmouth professor and the faculty advisor for the Review, only said, “Well, Ben, you should feel lucky you didn't have the guy in a scissors lock.”

But it wasn't just The Dartmouth Review crowd's campus antics that gained them notoriety. Their reporting put Dartmouth under a microscope, and the heat got so intense for Dartmouth that reporters for the Review routinely found themselves dealing with all of the fun side effects that can go with being a student journalist at a modern-day university. Such as being thrown off campus for a year-and-a-half.

“The Dartmouth Review,” D'Souza says, “in a sense, can take credit for getting rid of two tenured professors at Dartmouth—Mr. and Mrs. William Cole.” He also notes that that isn't an accomplishment many other student groups at the college can brag about.

It started when a reporter for the Review inferred that Cole was a sort of “soft belly” of affirmative action at Dartmouth. Cole, a black professor who was then the chairman of Dartmouth's music department, was known for his music classes that had very little to do with music or teaching. Instead, they mostly consisted of political ranting. Knowing of this reputation, Review reporters audited his class in the first couple weeks of the term, armed with tape recorders, and recorded his lectures. The transcriptions were published in the Review, and, as D'Souza recalls, they were “so embarrassing and stupid that the whole college froze with embarrassment.”

Cole was furious. D'Souza remembers that Cole once telephoned the Review office and only a second after D'Souza had picked up the phone, “a huge pouring of obscenities rolled out.”

“We had the goods on the guy and the only insult was to quote him.”

Cole then refused to teach his class until the reporter for the Review apologized to him for the article—something that wasn't going to happen, as the Review reporter wasn't even in his class, D'Souza says. But once the Dartmouth administration got word that Cole wasn't teaching his courses, they soon made it clear to him that this was unacceptable. Later, a $2.4 million libel suit that Cole filed against the Review was thrown out of court.

But that wasn't the end of Cole's embarrassing legacy. A few years later, in 1988, “three or four students went to his class to ask him some questions,” D'Souza explains.

“Cole came and started shouting at them.” And while the conflagration did not involve any physical violence, Cole filed a complaint against the students present—who were then found guilty of “vexatious oral exchange.” In short, the students were subjected to a college tribunal and suspended—some for as long as 18 months—because they aggravated a professor.

“Under what context of free speech is that an indictable offense?” D'Souza says. “That's ludicrous.”

In addition, Cole's wife, Sarah Sully, a professor of French that D'Souza describes as “kind of a Hillary Clinton type,” also got into trouble with the Dartmouth bosses. During the final examination for one of her courses, “she assigned her students an essay called `What I Think About The Dartmouth Review,'” D'Souza says.

And while most of the students either knew that she was William Cole's wife, or were smart enough to realize that something was up, one student actually wrote what he thought. “He wrote that the Review goes overboard sometimes, but that it is kind of funny and that I enjoy it,” D'Souza says. He got a D.

The student, understandably perplexed over his poor grade, showed it to his roommates. They thought it looked fine, so he took it to the school's dean, who looked it over and had it reviewed by a committee of three professors. They gave it a B.

D'Souza recalls that the dean told Sully that she could either give the student a B or give him the test over again. She told him she would resign before doing either. D'Souza says that the dean's response was quick and to the point: “So be it.”

“That's the way you have to deal with them,” Patrick Collins says, looking back on his days at Yale's Light and Truth. Collins, now a venture capitalist in California, is one of the founders and a former editor of the paper. And just before Thanksgiving in 1994, Collins broke one of the biggest stories in the history of collegiate journalism: the fact that Yale University, despite having received $20 million from Texas oilman Lee Bass in order to found a program for sophomores to study Western Civilization, was doing nothing to implement such a program. His fight to discover what happened to the Bass monies, and then his fight against the Yale authorities to publicize that story, is a case study in how conservative newspaper editors are increasingly willing to push back when the universities push them around.

“The initial grant was received in a very high-profile fashion by the then-president [Benno Schmidt] and dean [Donald Kagan],” Collins recalls.

“They solicited the Bass grant to do a one-year, selective elective program for sophomores.” Approximately 70-100 sophomores would take four year-long courses studying the major themes of Western Civilization under the tutelage of some of the nation's top professors. But after Schmidt and Kagan were tossed out of Yale's leadership, in what Collins describes as a left-wing putsch, the creation of the program flatlined. “The objections to it were both very public and very outspoken,” Collins remembers.

So Collins began to do some searching. After months of researching and interviewing, he had finally accumulated enough evidence of Yale's refusal to take any action with the Bass monies to go to press with his story. What was Yale's response?

“They really went after us,” Collins recalls, “and it was a real struggle to get this out. It was clear to the staff that this was an effort to intimidate us.”

Yale began to apply the screws before the issue came out, Collins says, and they did so by revoking Light and Truth's registration as a student group, along with mandating that any fund-raising effort on the part of the magazine to alumni had to have each piece individually approved. Losing their registration meant that Light and Truth could no longer distribute on campus, whereas the stipulation that the university would have to approve each item in a fund-raising bulk mailing meant that for all intents and purposes, Light and Truth's fundraising apparatus would be shut down. In addition, the college threatened disciplinary action against any student who violated these regulations. It was even more amazing because the University had told them how to go about registering the group in the first place.

“[It was] a pretty concerted effort to get in our way,” he remembers, and the staff was preoccupied over whether the school would try to sue them, or pursue charges against them. Seventy-five percent of the magazine's staff quit, and Collins ended up publishing his first issue with only three people on board—himself and two freshmen. They published the first issue of Light and Truth, with the Bass story on the cover, the week before Thanksgiving. They also fought back “as hard as they could” by trying to get the story out to as many people as possible, informing alumni and media of their discovery. “A week later the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that blew it wide open...” Collins recalls.

“The University was making clear that they intended to treat us with a very heavy hand,” he says, “...[but] it all worked out well because the Wall Street Journal came riding to the rescue.”

Legal action, or the threat of it, wasn't just a problem for Light and Truth. Since so many conservative papers are run on a shoestring budget, even going to trial would prove to be an incredible, if not insurmountable, financial burden on them. That was one of the things that concerned John Miller, now currently national political reporter for National Review, when he edited the Michigan Review in 1989-1990.

“One of our reporters, through some sources of hers—and good ones—did a story about a particular professor hired by the university,” Miller says. The professor was hired out of graduate school in the late '70s, having all but her dissertation complete. She was also a minority. “But she had been hired over at least one candidate who had some teaching experience,” Miller recalls, “and our sources in the history department told us this was an affirmative-action hire.”

When the story broke, the university demanded an apology from the Review and threatened to take legal action. “I re-reported the entire story,” Miller says. “Her reporting was accurate.”

“The university knew that it really had no case,” he continued,” and didn't sue us. We wound up printing what we called a clarification.” This consisted of a small box “on page three or four” that cleared up some items that could have been troublesome. “Once we did, the whole thing died down,” he concluded.

It didn't die down for Avik Roy, however. As the founder of MIT/Wellesley's Counterpoint magazine during his undergraduate days in the early 1990s, Roy was sued for libel in 1993 by Tony Martin, a professor of “Africana Studies” at Wellesley. Martin alleged that Roy had libeled him when describing the circumstances that led to Martin's being approved for tenure in 1975. Roy's article described Martin's involvement in an imbroglio with a Wellesley undergraduate—and while Martin did not sue over that, he did sue over Roy's description of how he obtained tenure; Roy had asserted he gained it only after suing the school for racial discrimination. Martin's case was thrown out of court last year, with the judge ruling that Roy's account was “substantially true” and that it did not harm Martin's reputation.

Martin, whom Roy describes as the “Leonard Jeffries of Massachusetts,” was at the time in hot water for using anti-Semitic tracts and Nation of Islam books as reading material for a course he was teaching on the transatlantic slave trade, which he claimed Jews were responsible for. “It took five years, but he lost the case very decisively,” Roy says. “He knew he couldn't sue ABC News, but he could sue students.”

Sometimes the hatred that conservative papers have attracted has gone from the personal almost to the physical. Ross Cohen, the founder and former editor of the Amherst Spectator, and now a law student at Harvard, cheerfully recalls dire happenings during his days at Amherst (1996-1999).

“One student came up to me and threatened me with physical violence if we ever wrote anything about him again,” Cohen recalls. “The name sign on my [dorm room] door was set on fire.... One of our editors was put in a chokehold by an editor of another publication.”

“We're very fortunate that we have a sub-group of people which are willing to put up with that,” says Avik Roy. “People are [verbally] attacked just for being affiliated with Light and Truth,” he says—noting that even a student's closest friends might rake him over the coals for being a part of it.

“My life was threatened in [the Marxist student publication at Duke] The Missing Link, stating that I would be the first one against the wall” when the revolution finally came, Stan Ridgley remembers. The Missing Link was the type of publication that would refer to “armed struggle” on a regular basis, and graffiti was written in campus bathrooms saying that Ridgley and his family should be killed.

“We had death threats on the answering machine that were more amusing than anything, but they would have freaked my mother out,” John Miller says. “One time, an issue was burned on the steps of the Michigan Union by ACT-UP” because of an article the Review had published that was critical of the group. “That was actually an incredibly useful thing to happen. It kind of illustrated the attitude the left has.”

All of these events have not happened in a void, and the papers have not evolved in isolation from each other. In 1996, there were 52 papers; in 1997, 60; in 1998, 65; in 1999, 71. But the quick growth not withstanding, Ridgley says that a certain campus environment has to exist for a conservative college newspaper to form.

“When we say `conservative' on a college campus,” Ridgley notes, “we're talking about mainstream ideas. American ideas that have been marginalized on [the] college campus. The fact of the matter is that conservative college newspapers don't exist where they're not needed. They exist on college campuses where the voice of reason is being denied.” And they thrive where unreasonable voices are as loud as ever.

“When I set foot on campus in September 1988, I didn't think of myself as political,” John Miller says. “What I wanted to do was work on a student newspaper.” At Michigan, he came into contact with both the Michigan Daily, the regular campus daily, and the Michigan Review.

“The first few issues of the Daily were so abominably bad,” Miller recalls. “They were stupid,” he says (adding that he uses that word carefully), and the paper ran “offensively dumb” editorials. Then he read an issue of the Review. “For me, there was no choice,” he says.

Stan Ridgley recalls what led him to found the Duke Review. “I wrote a conservative column called `Point Blank' for the Chronicle [Duke's student-run daily newspaper].... My column was repeatedly censored or simply not printed.” A lot of excuses were given. Editors would tell him that “the column didn't conform to our standards” or it “attacked another columnist.”

“A lot of `problems' cropped up in the production of my column,” Ridgley says, noting that they didn't happen to other columnists. “I thought I was being censored.”

So Ridgley left the Chronicle and founded the Duke Review in 1989, a time which saw the conservative cause at a low point on that campus. “You had a Marxist newsletter, The Missing Link, a whole range of literary and ethnic publications, but no conservative publications. There was a gap there, a void,” he says.

The Duke Review's first issue had the CIA logo and then-Attorney General Ed Meese on the cover. They distributed it during an anti-CIA rally that was being held at Duke. While distributing the paper, they came across an angry group of demonstrators. One of the protestors shouted at them, her fist raised in the air, “Death to the CIA! Death to the Duke Review!”

But the Duke Review just published its tenth-anniversary issue, and The Dartmouth Review is nearing its twentieth, whereas The Missing Link is missing in action.

Avik Roy says that “there was a recent forum at Yale sponsored by the Yale Council of Colleges and the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered] Forum on issues relating to free speech and sexuality.” During a debate over discrimination, a conservative arguing that right-wingers face more discrimination than do homosexuals in the academy actually won the debate.

The right has a long way to go on campus before it is more than a prophetic minority. Despite their successes in the last twenty years, it may take another twenty years before conservatives have regained an equal footing with the left in the arena of American higher education. But while the conservative collegiate newspaper movement may not yet be poised for victory, they are ready for permanent warfare.