The New Face Of The Campus Left

Sam Graham-Felsen, The Nation | Full Story | When a group called Campus Progress launched its effort to promote progressive values on college campuses in the fall of 2004, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wondered: “Isn’t that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?“

The assumption that America’s campuses are impenetrable bastions of liberalism—where left-leaning faculty predominate, progressive student activism flourishes and conservatism is fiercely marginalized—still rules the day. But in reality, since the 1970s the conservative movement has become the dominant political force on many American campuses. This sea change is not simply a reflection of some students’ increasingly right-wing views. Each year, conservative groups pour more than $35 million into hundreds of college campuses. They pay for right-wing speakers, underwrite scores of student papers, provide free leadership training and cushy internships, and equip thousands of new activists with talking points, discipline and missionary zeal.

Today’s campus right is unified, on-message and passionate—in other words, part of a genuine movement. By contrast, the campus left is disparate, undisciplined and segmented along ideological and issue-based lines. Student progressives have struggled for decades with not only a lack of cohesion but a dearth of resources. “We didn’t have our act together,” says Joshua Holland, a fair-trade and antiwar activist who graduated from the University of Southern California this past spring. “We tried to keep things nonhierarchical and loosely structured, but at the end of the day, there was a lot of running around in circles, and we weren’t getting anything done.” >>

Published 06.02.02 02:00:00 -0500 GMT | Posted by Andrew Garib on 06.02.02 | |

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