>The Right, for all their sneering at "the cultural elite" (which is
>mainly for public consumption), take higher education -- at least as
>a battlefield in a Gramscian war of ideological positions +
>government expenditure -- far more seriously than the Left do in the
>USA. _Guide to Uncovering the Right on Campus_, eds. Dalya Massachi
>& Rich Cowan, is a helpful countermove by the Left. Naturally, we
>don't have the same financial resources as the Right, but we have
>enough manpower to make some change (if not a great deal of change).
>We need, however, a change in attitude toward ideological work.
I have in my possession the book, "Uncovering the Right on Campus," put out by the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO). Unfortunately, I heard recently that the CCO is now defunct. They were a valuable resource, and it's too bad that they went under just when there are all these new formations in the student movement. At least the United States Student Association (USSA) can offer some help, esp. through their Grassroots Organizing Weekend (GROW) training program, the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) and the like, but USSA doesn't have a presence on many campuses, and I get the feeling that a whole lot of campus activists feel like they're going it on their own, with nothing like a nationwide clearinghouse or resource center to help them out.
This is disappointing, because even with the meager resources that the left and progressive forces in the USA currently possess, they ought to be devoting some resources to the campuses, because that really is where a lot of new leadership is going to come from. (Interest declared: I'm an undergraduate activist myself, but I think I know what I'm talking about.)
Anyway, the edition of "Uncovering the Right on Campus" in my possession is a 1997 edition, and if I'm not mistaken it's the latest one, so a lot of the stuff is outdated. Is there anyone who's keeping track of the current state of the right-wing foundations that operate on campus?
Last I checked the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) was still the largest foundation, with a huge apparatus covering all sorts of stuff including the Collegiate Network, which is the network of right-wing student newspapers. (The 1997 edition of "Uncovering the Right on Campus" still has the Collegiate Network listed under the rubric of the Madison Center, but I know that ISI bought them out some time ago. Don't know if they swallowed up the entire Madison Center or just the Collegiate Network.) Plus there's the Young America's Foundation (YAF), which is an offshoot of the Young Americans for Freedom (does this latter organization still exist?); they have a bunch of the high-profile noxious right-wingers that they send out to the campuses, including D'Souza, Oliver North, and Star Parker (an ex-welfare recipient who gets paid to go around saying that yes, in fact, black mothers on welfare are lazy cheats who need to be taught personal responsibility, yadda yadda yadda). When they have a speaker, they usually have all kinds of materials in the back for purchase, including pamphlets and posters with a "revolutionary" look. (I remember vividly a poster they were offering for sale when D'Souza was at Pitt. It was glossy and extremely colorful and had striking profile photographs of African-Americans, with a quotation from . . . Booker T. Washington, to the effect that the "best" black people are the ones who work hard, take what life gives them and don't make a fuss.) This very weekend, the YAF is holding a conference in downtown Pittsburgh, a regional conference of some sort, featuring John Stossel as a speaker, where students had to put up a $100 credit card deposit up-front, but which turns out to be free -- including meals and a hotel stay -- if they actually show up. They even have a section of their conference -- call it the Astroturf Organizing Weekend, if you will -- set up for the young 'uns to meet with all the big donors.
Of course, the ideological right doesn't have a really large base, at least at predominantly working-class universities, so on most campuses it looks like it's the five or less white male right-wingers who write for the campus right-wing paper, which sometimes looks very nice and professionally-produced and glossy and is distributed for free because it is the recipient of so much cash. Luckily for us here in Pittsburgh, our campus right-wingers -- at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon -- are pretty dumb and incompetent; a few years ago they had a paper called The Phoenix which was printed on cheap-ass newsprint paper and went under, in contrast to the more professional right-wing campus standbys like the Dartmouth Review, which have survived for years. I have learned, however, that some College Republicans are looking to start a new newspaper called the Pitt Patriot, and I've also learned that they're supposed to be meeting with people from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute during this YAF conference. Putting two and two together, my conjecture is that they're going to start receiving technical advice -- and not a little money -- from the outside right-wingers to carry on their agenda. (By the way, they claim they're starting it because our high-circulation student newspaper, The Pitt News, decided not to run Horowitz's ad.)
I've learned all this stuff because (1) I have a little birdie on the College Republicans' e-mail list, and the birdie sings often, and (2) I've done a little background research via the Internet on the campus right's off-campus backers. Obviously, Organizing 101 teaches you that you have to worry first about your targets (and for student activists, that usually means the administration) rather than your opponents, who may be obnoxious but don't possess any real power. Still, it's helpful to have an idea of what's behind the right-wing creeps and to be able to anticipate what they do.
So is anyone keeping track of this now that CCO is gone? Who are the big players on the campus right these days? Is ISI still running the Collegiate Network? What's the relationship between groups like ISI and YAF, and groups like the Center for Individual Rights (CIR, which has taken money from the openly racist Pioneer Fund and which a few years ago ran an ad in campus newspapers at "fallback schools" -- like my own -- urging white males who felt they had been denied admission to certain universities because of affirmative action to give them a ring and join them in their lawsuits) and Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), for example? Obviously these groups work in tandem from time to time, but I imagine that just like groups on the left, there must be some inter-organizational jealousies, competition for (much more plentiful) resources, etc.
Is anyone thinking of putting together an updated version of "Uncovering the Right on Campus" that covers all of this stuff?
Thanks,
John Lacny