TDR – “Provocative rather than persuasive…”

So claims “Scoop” Duncan Currie, editorial assistant, on Weekly Standard Online:

“The most self-defeating thing philosophical conservatives can do in such an environment is retreat into a form of identity politics, i.e., play the persecuted campus minority and be deliberately provocative rather than persuasive. With undergraduates much less radically inclined than they once were, such Dartmouth Review-type rabble-rousing could easily ghettoize conservative students. For example: Harvard’s conservative journal, the Salient, has become notorious in recent years for publishing fairly strident articles on homosexuality. On a campus where “organization kids” predominate, there’s no quicker way for a right-wing publication to make itself peripheral to student life.”

Currie is a 2004 graduate of Harvard. The full text of the article can be found here.

I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d much rather be in The Dartmouth Review‘s “ghetto” (a well-appointed Main Street Office with lofty vaulted ceilings) than that of the Harvard College Republicans.