For those given to despairing over the overwhelming one-sidedness of political opinion at our major universities, I have a message of hope: all is not lost. Small bands of students have taken it upon themselves to bring alternative viewpoints to campus and challenge the otherwise unmolested prevailing orthodoxies.
In North Carolina, rebellious students have worked to produce alternative publications that regularly take issue with the establishment view. These include NC State’s Broadside, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Review, UNC-Wilmington’s Conservative Hawk, the Davidson Reader, and Duke’s Gothic Guardian.
For two years, I wrote for one of these publications. Inspired by Dinesh D’souza’s account of his college troublemaking days at the Dartmouth Review in Letters to a Young Conservative and armed with a basic understanding of conservative principles, I signed up for the Carolina Review. It was an illuminating experience.
I was immediately struck by how much the staff at the Review cared about our country, our state, and our school—they had an opinion to share on everything from ethanol subsidies to Kwanzaa to student ticket distribution to legalistic theology, and they took such things seriously. I met some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve ever known. In fact, they were so well-read that at first I almost didn’t join, thinking that I was unqualified to work with people who used words like “Sisyphean” and “oeuvre” and actually knew what they meant.
Writing for CR was one of the most fun things I did at UNC, and, while there, I did my best to challenge conventional thinking. One article I wrote questioning the environmental value of recycling was brought up by a speaker in my friends’ environmental studies class. The speaker, a representative of Orange County Recycling, was so troubled by what I wrote that he asked for a student volunteer to rebut my argument (I never saw or heard of any).
Another article I wrote opposing affirmative action sparked a three–week firestorm in the Daily Tar Heel opinion page, bringing considerable notoriety to the Review since it took a heretical view on what many consider a “sacred cow.”
I have finished college, but the struggle to stand athwart the predominant campus leftism continues. I recently talked with the editors of North Carolina’s alternative student publications to find out how they’re faring.
Kevin King is the founding editor of the Conservative Hawk. He told me he started the paper last year partly as a means of bringing to light campus issues that he thought the Seahawk, UNC-W’s regular school paper, did a poor job of covering. According to King, the Conservative Hawk filled a void for investigative journalism, asking tough questions about such things as faculty salaries and the way the university distributes funds to different departments.
“We wanted to drum up conversation,” King said, and it appears to have worked: “There was discussion, debating, people questioning things” to a degree much greater than before the Hawk was published. Besides just generating discussion, the Hawk managed to ruffle a few academic feathers. Some administrators got an earful from faculty after the magazine published the salary and raises of various faculty members.
Trent Serwetz is the editor-in-chief of Duke’s Gothic Guardian, a journal that bills itself as “The Conservative Magazine of Duke University.” Like King and the Conservative Hawk, Serwetz believes the Guardian’s primary “contribution comes in the form of asking some good questions.” Published quarterly, the magazine reliably has “a good variety of provocative stories cast from a viewpoint that isn’t heard very often.” The Guardian presents an alternative not only to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy but also to the traditional conservative one. One of its contributors (the notorious Justin Robinette, the former Duke College Republicans chairman who claimed he was ousted because he was a homosexual) even went so far as to argue that the conservative movement should expel social conservatives from its ranks. There are also traditional conservatives on staff, however, and executive editor Amy Li said the magazine does not try to influence the opinions of its writers. The Guardian thus expresses a range of views that challenge the beliefs of just about everyone.
North Carolina State University’s student body is considerably more conservative-minded than the other North Carolina colleges with alternative papers, but the staff at Broadside magazine still feels it is making a valuable contribution to the university community. Although “the conservative viewpoint seems to be the norm [at State],” wrote managing editor Paul Valone, “academia always has a left leaning and NCSU is no different in that professors seem to be biased in their teachings.” He mentioned an economist who praises socialism and a sociology professor who expresses admiration for Mao Zedong, saying that a leftward slant is “inescapable on campus.”
Additionally, many students seldom think about current events. Broadside, in Valone’s view, helps remedy that situation by covering stories that students might not otherwise hear about or hear about only from a narrow perspective. And he has a great time doing it: “Nothing is better than being able to write, vent, and convey your point across and have other people read it. It is great fun.”
The Davidson Reader is also fun to produce, according to editor Zach Bennett. Although Davidson is a fairly liberal-minded university, the Reader has experienced a mostly favorable reception. For example, the magazine has published such controversial articles as “Global Warming is not a Religion,” and Bennett said “I’ve actually been struck by the number of professors who have complimented the magazine and thanked us for challenging the liberal consensus that prevails here.”
My old friends at Carolina Review also find publishing their magazine to be exciting, if for somewhat different reasons. They often don’t receive a warm welcome, and that’s just fine with them. Having had enough of the ubiquitous self-congratulatory leftism at UNC, editor-in-chief Zach Dexter and company are eager to pick a fight. “Our role is to provide an intelligent alternative to the leftwing dogma constantly pushed by professors and many students,” he said.
According to senior editor Anthony Dent, “the mere presence of the Carolina Review causes backlash.” For example, at a recent debate with the Young Democrats, Democrat David Murray stood up in front of the crowd, pointed at Dexter and Dent, asked rhetorically if they agreed with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and loudly accused them of being xenophobes and corporate shills. Dexter and Dent barely flinched, apparently used to such ad hominem attacks.
Aside from the rough and tumble of on-campus political battles, the Review staff also aspires to go beyond mere politics, challenging the deeper assumptions held by many students. Dent told me he sees the Review as a defender of religion, tradition, and traditional morality. “The deeper mission of the Review is to articulate our vision of the world,” he said, and, to that end, the Review has “actually made [many students] reconsider their preconceived notions.”
Furthermore, in between printings of the dead-tree magazine, the Review staff get the message out via their popular website CRDaily.com. It doesn’t get as many hits as the Daily Tar Heel website, but “our blog posts receive more comments and cause much more of a stir than their blog posts,” Dexter said.
On a side note, all the publications whose editors I talked to (with the exception of Kevin King and the Conservative Hawk) received at least a little help from the Collegiate Network, a group that supports over 100 such papers nationwide. Collegiate Network, part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, provides financial resources, training, and various other benefits that help students found and maintain independent media outlets. For example, it gives $3,000 annually to support the Davidson Reader and also provided the funds for Carolina Review to bring David Horowitz to campus last spring.
With the Network’s help, considerable effort, and the strength of their convictions, the students working to produce alternative publications make a valuable contribution to their campuses’ marketplace of ideas (and are apparently having a great time doing so). Even students who disagree with them can find value in being intellectually challenged, and may learn to defend their own positions more effectively than simply calling their opponents xenophobes and corporate shills.