Conservative Student Newspapers on the Rise

[JMJ_Pinoy]

December 10, 2004

Conservative Student Newspapers on the Rise
*by Stuart Shepard, correspondent *

Alternatives to liberal media are springing up more and more on campus.

A record number of conservative campus newspapers started up this year, sharing a mission to bring some balance to what students hear in the classroom, in the official student papers and on TV.

Andrea Irvin works on a conservative magazine at one of the most liberal campuses in the country.

“Writing a conservative publication at Berkley can definitely be trying and difficult at times,” Irvin said, “but it definitely makes the experience more rewarding.”

She said the goal of the California Patriot newspaper is to fill a need on campus.

“Most of the time,” she said, “kids on campus get nothing but left-wing opinion.”

Jim Eltringham of the Leadership Institute said his group’s Campus Leadership program seeks to change that dynamic.

"What the Campus Leadership program tells students is, ‘Don’t complain about the media, just go out and be the media,’ " he said.

So far this year, the Leadership Institute has helped 22 conservative campus papers get started through funding and training.

“Most of the students are sitting in the classroom and really only getting half of an education,” Eltringham said. “It’s up to the conservative students who recognize that bias to go out and make sure that both sides are heard.”

And not just on campus. Recent college graduate Jessica Stollings said when she watches the news, it’s with the knowledge that it may not be long before her face is on the screen because she chooses to get involved.

“We tend as Christians to kind of sometimes sit back and boycott or complain about what’s on the news, or what we’re seeing and be discouraged,” she said. “Well, why are we not out there in the middle of it making a difference?”

FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Leadership Institute (leadershipinstitute.org/index_flash.cfm) Web site offers more information about itself and its role in fostering conservative news on campus.

family.org/cforum/fnif/news/a0034846.cfm%between%

 

[CaptSC]

More hope for 2008.

 

[HagiaSophia]

Well they are going to have to battle their way through the “policies” of the liberals insofar as their free speech is concerned. Daniel Flynn has written a four part series on how the left has co-opted higher education in many ways and says:

“Liberating tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse famously wrote in 1965, is “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

A few years later, MIT’s Noam Chomsky warned his readers: “By accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.”

More than a generation later, the campus inheritors of the legacy of Marcuse, Chomsky, and other intellectual morons are heeding their unwise counsel.

The very place where speech should be the freest is where speech faces its greatest restrictions. This is especially true if the one expressing that speech does so in a way that the Left doesn’t like.

During Thanksgiving break, newspaper thieves stole the entire press run of The Yale Free Press. The latest theft follows a similar one a few years ago of another conservative publication at Yale, Light and Truth, by resident assistants working for the school.

The school punished no one in the earlier thefts, so what deterrent would anti-free speech activists face for the new round of thefts? Already, the Yale administration shows little interest in investigating the current matter.

When student editors complained to the school’s dean of students, she passed the buck and told the editors to make a complaint to each head of Yale’s eleven residential colleges.

An anonymous Rutgers University group calling itself Progressive Activists took credit for stealing about 5,000 copies of the Medium, a weekly humor magazine that had offended campus feminists by mocking them.

Shortly before the disappearance of stacks of the issue, a Rutgers women’s studies professor teaching a course called “Woman, Culture and Society” required her students to get their peers to sign a petition calling for a campus-wide ban on the Medium.

Rutgers feminists dismiss a connection between the feminist professor’s assignment and the newspaper thefts. “I don’t even know that they’re stolen,” the head of the Rutgers women’s studies department dismissively told columnist Paul Mulshine. “Do you have evidence that they’re stolen?”

On the Internet, where difficulties arise in newspaper confiscation, the Left’s response to conservative student publications is nevertheless disturbing.

In reaction to campus conservative netzine BSYou.net, an angry Ball State University employee and PhD candidate, Christopher Wendt, allegedly superimposed the female undergraduate editor’s face on pornographic images and posted them on another site.

Jim Eltringham of the Campus Leadership Program, the organization I direct and that helped underwrite BSYou.net, commented on the cybersmear: “There are many acceptable and appropriate ways to answer political speech. Harassment, intimidation, and doctored pornography are not among them.”

Restrictions on speech are a normal part of one-party states. With campaign donations to John Kerry outnumbering campaign donations to George W. Bush $32 to $1 at Harvard, $22 to $1 at Penn, and $11 to $1 at Yale, can anyone doubt that elite campuses have become one-party institutions? "…

newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/12/10/85856.shtml

Daniel Flynn

This is the fourth article in a series on bias within higher education.
Part I: Deep Blue Campuses
Part II: Academia Embraces Terrorists
Part III: Academic Snobs Ban the Military