Campaign '04: The Right's New Wing

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The well-funded national organizations backing the young right encourage campus conservatives to see themselves as oppressed minorities. "Young America's Foundation alleviates the isolation so many young conservatives face," says a brochure for the National Conservative Student Conference. Another YAF pamphlet says its speakers "energize students in the fight for freedom on campus against radically anti-American, leftist professors."

Small wonder, then, that the students have started to mimic the left's rhetoric of victimhood. A prominent student conservative--Charles Mitchell of Pennsylvania's Bucknell University--urged conference attendees to return to their campuses and create "safe zones" for conservatives, who are, he said, "constantly under attack." Antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, darkly warned that Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues--a collection of sketches about women's sexual experiences that was performed on more than 600 campuses last year--has inspired "an army" of campus feminists whom she called "very elitist." Sommers told the audience, "You have been marginalized. You have to begin to demand some kind of representation."

Conservatives have even joined the push for campus diversity. A young-right group called Students for Academic Freedom is pressing states to adopt its Academic Bill of Rights, which would require colleges to promote "intellectual diversity" among their faculties, guest speakers and assigned authors. (Practically speaking, of course, such diversity would mean hiring more conservatives.) After a version of the bill was introduced in the Colorado legislature this year, the state's four biggest universities agreed to examine whether political diversity is threatened on their campuses. Legislators in four other states have also introduced versions of the bill.

In the early '90s, conservatives called multiculturalism divisive and anti-intellectual. Now they use it to their advantage. "I tell [the students], 'Use the word diversity, but make it about diversity of ideas. Use their language against them,'" says Coyle. His organization even recommends that conservative students advertise lectures on race with flyers screeching "Where Are MY Reparations?"

Coyle defends YAF's to-the-barricades approach as the only way to combat a liberal advantage. "Conservatives don't control the faculty. They don't control the administration. They don't control the student government," he says. Among the conservative students I have met over the past few months, nearly every one has offered a tale of antiright bias: half a dozen kids at different schools in California and New York told me their professors had derided President Bush in class. Others complained about the proliferation of programs in women's studies, African-American studies--even labor studies--while conservative scholars such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (both Nobel laureates) are rarely assigned.