Campaign '04: The Right's New Wing

--The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) of Wilmington, Del., a 51-year-old group whose first president was Buckley. The institute spends nearly $1 million a year helping students publish conservative newspapers. Its Collegiate Network of papers now includes 85 publications, a record number for the institute. The ISI spent an additional $9 million last year on conservative books, periodicals like Campus and fellowships worth as much as $40,000 for individual students.

--The Leadership Institute, based in Arlington, Va. Led by former Reagan aide Morton Blackwell, 64, the institute had a record 3,562 graduates last year. The students, most of whom attend college or high school, learn about p.r., fund raising and direct mail; aspiring young pols get "candidate development" training. In its 25 years, according to Blackwell, the institute has trained some 40,000 conservatives--the movement's field army--including nearly 200 who went on to become state legislators and more than 300 who wound up as staff members on Capitol Hill.

Because of the social movements of the '60s and '70s, when we think of college activism, we tend to imagine Kent State and braless young women. But today the left can claim no youth organizations as powerful as YAF, ISI or the Leadership Institute. One of the biggest young-liberal groups, the Sierra Student Coalition (an arm of the Sierra Club), has a budget of just $350,000 for 150 college chapters. There were once as many as 200 left-leaning Public Interest Research Groups at U.S. universities, but today only about half that number exist. Last school year, the 38-year-old National Organization for Women spent twice the amount it usually does on campus in order to publicize April's feminist march on Washington, but the total, $500,000, was just 4% of Young America's budget.

New, energetic liberal groups such as Students Against Sweatshops and the League of Pissed Off Voters have won some media attention, but it's not yet clear whether they will thrive. By contrast, the College Republican National Committee, which atrophied to just 409 chapters in 1998, now lists active members on 1,148 campuses. The College Democrats of America say they have members on 903 campuses, 20% fewer.

Of course, as activists on left and right note when they hear such figures, the left doesn't need to organize on campuses as urgently because universities have traditionally been hospitable to liberal inquiry. "There are thousands of Young America's Foundations around the country for the left," says Daniel Flynn, director of the Campus Leadership Program at the Leadership Institute and author of the new left-bashing book Intellectual Morons. "They're called Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford ..."