What if they threw a revolution and nobody came?
CONSERVATIVE FOUNDATIONS ARE POURING MONEY INTO TRADITIONALLY LIBERAL CAMPUSES IN THE HOPES OF CONVERTING A NEW GENERATION OF RIGHT-WING RADICALS, BUT WILL THEIR MILLIONS BEAR FRUIT?

BY BEN FRITZ | Ask most people to name a marginalized minority in need of support, and you'll probably get answers like Native Americans, single mothers on welfare or perhaps even a Republican senator who voted against impeachment. Ask David Kalstein, however, and you'll get a very different answer: conservative college students.

If you're thinking anyone who believes conservatives are a marginalized minority needs their head examined, you haven't spent much time on a college campus recently. On campuses across the country, small but vocal groups of conservative students are organizing to demand the respect they claim they have been denied by the liberal majority. Thousands of right-leaning young people have joined this radical -- or is it reactionary? -- cause, fed up with what Kalstein, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania and the editor of Campus, a nationally distributed conservative newspaper, describes as "abuses and bullying on the part of faculty, radical student groups and university administrators."

In their self-description as young radicals fighting the good fight against an oppressive administration, Kalstein and his conservative brethren seem to be positioning themselves as the modern-day equivalent of the New Left of the '60s. Yet the vast majority of politically active students in the '60s were mostly left to their own organizational devices. (Even charges that the young revolutionaries were being guided and bankrolled by Soviet agents only applied to a tiny minority of the student population.) But in 1999, those who fancy themselves Enemies of the State have numerous foundations whose sole purpose is to support them in their fight against the purported liberal hegemony. Which leads to the question: Are campus radicals like David Kalstein a product of the universities they are aligned against or the foundations on which they depend?

Although such chicken-and-egg questions remain under debate, it's undeniable that conservative foundations are playing an increasingly powerful role in shaping conservative student activism. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), one of the most prominent of such groups, funds more than 60 "alternative" (i.e. conservative) newspapers at top colleges around the country, as well as the aforementioned Campus, which has a circulation of 250,000 and a cover price of $0. Along with similar organizations, most notably the Young America's Foundation (YAF), ISI pays for prominent conservative speakers like Dinesh D'Souza and Oliver North to speak at campuses across the country, arranges all-expenses-paid organizing seminars for conservative students and funds a number of student fellowships. Located on private estates named after benefactor F.M. Kirby, both ISI and YAF operate with budgets estimated to be upwards of $5 million.

Such money may be going toward a worthwhile cause, if you buy the description of contemporary college life these organizations and their members present. As depicted by conservatives, institutions of higher learning seem practically Orwellian in the way they attempt to mold students. A recently published book by Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate, "The Shadow University," brings together many of these accusations in a 320-page attack on the modern university's "hidden, systematic assault upon liberty, individualism, dignity, due process and equality before the law." Kors and Silvergate claim that cases such as UCLA's suspension of a student editor for running an anti-affirmative action cartoon and the University of Massachusetts' optional separate residence halls for students of color demonstrate the existence of "a tyranny that seeks to assert absolute control over the souls, the conscience and the individuality of our students."

Conservative activists don't confine their outrage to the pervasive liberality of student life; they're just as vehement in their attack on curriculums gone wild. YAF is the leader in this department with its annual report, "Comedy and Tragedy," which chronicles -- with Starr-esque precision -- classes at 55 top colleges with "a preoccupation with race, sex and class" and "a virulent prejudice against Western culture, the United States, the free market and religion." The report reads like it was prepared by a computer programmed to find any course with a non-conservative term in the title, resulting in seemingly important classes like the University of Virginia's "Marx" being listed alongside those arguably less essential courses such as DePaul's "Rock Journalism."

Although neither ISI nor YAF are new organizations (the former is celebrating its 45th anniversary), both have grown significantly in prominence in the past few years. They have developed not only sophisticated campus outreach programs, but also strong public relations efforts that have garnered increased media attention. One telling example involved an introductory English class at Swarthmore College that taught a book that addressed homosexuality and AIDS in a graphic manner. YAF used the incident to get papers around the country to run stories about the "filth" that now passes for literature on college campuses. (Fanning the media flames, the group misrepresented the book as being taught in a class mandatory for English majors, which it was not.)

Such successes have resulted in skyrocketing budgets and resources for both groups. Young America's Foundation recently used some of those resources to acquire the Reagan Ranch in California, a longtime retreat of the former president and patron saint of young conservatives. The group plans to preserve it as a "historic site" and to use it as the setting for its new Ronald Reagan Leadership Development Program.

Like David Kalstein, Richard Delgado, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, is also angry about political influences on campus today. Yet for Delgado, the most dangerous influences are not "PC Nazis" imposing their liberal agenda on the young, but groups like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America's Foundation.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. A conservative student who despises her benefactors