The New Conservative Drive on Campuses

NY Times Magazine -- As with college conservative movements in the past, the recent wave has been fueled and often financed by an array of conservative interest groups, of which there are, today, almost too many to keep straight: Young Americans for Freedom; Young America's Foundation; the Leadership Institute; the Collegiate Network; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. These groups spend money in various ways to push a right-wing agenda on campuses: some make direct cash ''grants'' to student groups to start and run conservative campus newspapers; others provide free training in ''conservative leadership,'' often providing heavily subsidized travel to their ''publishing programs''; others provide help with the hefty speaking fees for celebrity right-wing speakers. Through these coordinated activities, these groups have embarked in the last three years on a concerted campus recruitment drive to turn temperamentally conservative youngsters into organized right-wing activists.

''They have a theory of getting them while they're young,'' says David Brock, a former college conservative who graduated from Berkeley in the mid-1980's. After spending almost a decade as an activist in the conservative movement (during which he published the 1993 liberal-bashing book, ''The Real Anita Hill''), Brock had a change of heart. In 2002, he published a book, ''Blinded by the Right,'' about his former life as a conservative-movement insider. ''People are searching for their identity in college,'' he says. ''The right try to instigate polarization so that it looks like the right wing is the alternative to the left. This is what happened to me. I went to Berkeley because it had a liberal reputation. But I became disillusioned with some of my experiences with the left on the campus and I had a knee-jerk reaction -- or I was looking for an alternative -- and there was the right. There really wasn't anything in the middle.''

Asked their opinion about casual sex, 51 percent of freshmen were for it in 1987; now 42 percent are. In 1989, 66 percent of freshmen believed abortion should be legal; today, only 54 percent do. In 1995, 66 percent of kids agreed that wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes; now it's down to 50 percent. Even on the issue of firearms, where students have traditionally favored stiffer controls, there has been a weakening in support for gun laws. ''We're at a record low on this item,'' says the U.C.L.A. Institute's associate director, Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at U.C.L.A. ''We've seen a decline over the last four consecutive years

According to Bryan Auchterlonie, the 24-year-old executive director of the Collegiate Network (a program administered by I.S.I.), the terrorist attacks helped to galvanize right-wing students across the nation. ''Students are upset with what they see as anti-Americanism on campuses,'' Auchterlonie says. ''Patriotism is big now.''

Visit any college campus today, and you're struck by the forces of what the conservatives call overweening political correctness that have seeped into every corner of life. Same-sex hand-holding days, ''Vagina Monologues'' performances, diversity training seminars, minority support groups, ''no means no'' dating rules, textbooks purified of gender, racial or class stereotypes -- for all their good intentions, these manifestations of enforced tolerance can create a stultifying air of conformity in college life. Hence the cries for ''individual responsibility'' and ''freedom of speech'' that are the leading slogans of today's campus conservative movement -- a deliberate echo of the left-wing Free Speech movements of the 1960's and a direct appeal to the natural impulse, on the part of young people, to rebel against the powers that be.

If the interest groups have worked hard to retrofit the college conservative movement as a right-wing version of the leftist Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's, they have worked equally hard to frame the conservative women's movement on campuses as a new brand of empowering feminism. A number of well-financed and highly organized conservative women's groups in Washington have been instrumental in leading the charge, among them the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Independent Women's Forum.

It can be disorienting to hear conservatism advanced as the ideology that frees women, but such is the skill with which the right has reframed the issues for the campus crowd, and such is the degree to which the left has allowed its own message to drift into rigidity and irrelevance for many college-age women.

These days, the interest groups encourage a hipper look. Auchterlonie encourages campus conservatives to drop the stiff-as-a-board ultraconservative attire. ''What conservatives really need help on is how to be cool on campus,'' Auchterlonie says. ''We're easily pigeonholed as loafer-wearing jerks.'' On visits to colleges across the country, he tells kids, ''You don't have to adopt, hook, line and sinker, the conservative outfits, conservative haircut, conservative philosophy, conservative everything.''

Geoff Schneider, an economics professor at Bucknell, says that the conservative group's constant charge in The Counterweight, that the university is infected by political correctness and that professors seek to indoctrinate students with a liberal agenda, has had an effect in the classroom. ''As the conservatives have become more prominent, other students are more prone to believe that they are being indoctrinated,'' Schneider says. ''So the openness of a number of students to new ideas and new ways of looking at things has actually moved in a disturbing direction. Students are much more willing to write off something as 'liberal talk' -- oh, I don't need to think about that, that's just ideology -- as opposed to thinking, in a complex way, about all of the different ideas and evaluating them.'' Kim Daubman, a social psychology professor, concurs. Recently she taught a class in which she talked about the theory that news coverage of warfare in Iraq could lead to a rise in homicides in the United States. ''I could see the students rolling their eyes,'' she says. ''I could just hear them thinking, 'Oh, there she goes again!'''