COLLEGIATE NETWORK
Most American college campuses are dominated by the left. Everything from English literature departments to the official student newspapers tend to be controlled by liberals or, now, even elements of the fashionable revolutionary vanguard. But since not all youth are leftists, outlets still exist for the energies of politically conscious campus conservatives. The Collegiate Network works to support those outlets at institutions of higher learning around the country.
"The Collegiate Network (CN), a program administered by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, provides support for alternative student publications across the country," says CN’s website. "There are over 70 member papers in the network, each of which is a strong champion of Western civilization, the free market, and limited government."
"A lot of people think we’re just a check-writing organization for student newspapers. We do that but we do a lot more," said Dr. Stanley K. Ridgley, executive director of CN. "We provide training, tradition, and transition."
Budding student journalists need funding, guidance in how to write copy and lay out a paper, and other technical knowledge, of course. But conservative young writers and editors need help in other ways as well.
"I think conservative students think naively that if they marshal their arguments and get their facts, they can win the argument," said Ridgley. "That’s just not true. College students have no institutional memory but administrations and faculties do. The students don’t know how to respond when they are persecuted. We provide the institutional memory. . . . College administrators and professors subscribe to the teachings of Herbert Marcuse, using the language of tolerance and liberation but meaning the opposite. Marcuse was most influential because his ideas sought specifically to undermine the idea of the university in the Western world. Ideas from the right should not be tolerated."
"The Collegiate Network was established to focus public awareness on the politicization of American college and university classrooms, curricula, and student life, and the resulting decline of educational standards," says a CN handbook. "To achieve this mission, the network provides financial and technical assistance to student editors and writers at scores of independent publications at leading colleges and universities around the country. These have a combined annual distribution of more than two million copies.
"Assistance includes annual operating grants, scholarships to the Network’s journalistic training conferences, story ideas and editorial resources, a quarterly newsletter, Internet discussion groups, year-long internships at national publications, and extensive guidance from experienced professionals." CN even helps college journalists make the transition to the professional world.
"The free speech situation on campus is getting worse in terms of conservative values and, I would say, American values, the values that the country was founded upon are increasingly unwelcome," said Ridgley. "There are assaults by noxious ethnic principles, bizarre philosophical principles. Campuses are no longer places for the free exchange of views but a stage for grandstanding on certain views." He named "affirmative action" and "the deleterious effect of Islam as a totalitarian religion" as two topics on which debate can be "criminalized" on campus.
"In 1979 two students at the University of Chicago asked a think-tank for help to counter the one-sided reporting that dominated the principal student publication on their campus," says CN. "Todd Lindberg and John Podhoretz, freshmen at the time, founded a newspaper that presented alternative views and they received a grant to defray publishing costs. Although nobody realized it at the time, this was the start of a grassroots movement that has since grown into the Collegiate Network.
"This movement seeks to call higher education back to its touchstones of academic freedom, intellectual integrity, unfettered debate on social and cultural issues, and an understanding of the values of Western civilization. Lindberg is now the editor of the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review and Podhoretz is the editorial page editor of the New York Post."
CN members today include the Amherst Spectator, Boise State Free Press, California Patriot (Berkeley), Chicago Criterion, Dartmouth Review, Harvard Salient, and Villanova Times.
"We’ve shown steady growth since we took over the network in ’95. . . . We have internship programs. We run a foreign correspondents course each year in Washington and Prague," said Ridgley. "We teach them how to be a foreign correspondent."
Ridgley said that he advises his journalists not to debate free speech when being harassed or intimidated by the left. "That’s a given. You have free speech," he said. "You say, ‘We want these people who have intimidated us and physically harassed us to be brought to justice. Also, we want sensitivity courses to teach them manners.’"
CN may be reached at 3901 Centervill Rd., P.O. Box 4431, Wilmington, Del. 19807 (800-225-2862; e-mail: [email protected]; website: www.isi.org/cn)
