THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’:
”Students are upset with what they see as anti-Americanism on campuses,” Auchterlonie says. ”Patriotism is big now.” It’s a patriotism that the national college movement has pushed to the fore as an issue that can win the sympathies of kids who are not overtly political. ”We handed out red, white and blue ribbons on the anniversary of 9/11,” Charles Mitchell says. ”I didn’t think anyone was going to take them. We ran out in half an hour.” . . .
But a movement based on patriotism and Reagan-worship alone could not have spread so rapidly nationwide. Here’s where the left has unwittingly helped to energize the conservative movement. 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.
Read the whole thing, which is pretty good, although the author takes a few too many pains to try to paint the growth of non-lefty campus activism as a creation of conservative Big Money — as if the 1960s variety of student activism was some sort of spontaneous creation without any nurturance from monied groups who shared its agenda.
UPDATE: David Bernstein has some observations. And Cardinal Collective notes:
But the big problem with the article is that it doesn’t take campus conservatives seriously as anything other than a tool created by national right-wing groups like the Leadership Institute (LI) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). It’s true that LI and ISI spend money to help fund some of these groups, especially when they are just getting started (and they are invaluable to campus conservatives for that) and each offers free seminars every year to help “train” people to be conservative activists, but the article dramatically overstates their influence.
Take it from me: I was the editor of the Stanford Review, Stanford’s conservative newspaper. LI and ISI invited us every year to go to their seminar – each year we viewed it as a fun way to meet people and get free drinks at the bar. And they do offer some good advice about how to get noticed and big mistakes that papers can make. But LI and ISI aren’t on the ground making editorial decisions or organizing campaigns by the College Republicans. They don’t have the staff or the influence to make a national campaign beyond publicizing what other organizations have done.
I don’t mean to denigrate these groups – as I said, they are a major influence in helping groups get off the ground and in making campus conservatives realize they are part of a national movement. But the writer of the article makes the usual mistake journalists make: he talked to the “grown-ups”, fell for their spin, and assumed they were calling the shots. After all, LI and ISI are going to tell the New York Times that they are absolutely essential to campus conservatism: it helps them get donors. And it makes a better story for the New York Times to see a vast right-wing conspiracy instead of an essentially student-run movement. But the truth is that there is no vast right-wing conspiracy and that LI and ISI think they are more essential than they are.
Orin Kerr, meanwhile, thinks he’s read this article before.