RECIPIENT PROFILE

www.isi.org/cn/

Collegiate Network, Inc.

Wilmington, DE 19807

The kids are all Right

Collegiate Network turns 25

By Bill Berkowitz
For MediaTransparency.org

POSTED NOVEMBER 30, 2004 --

Twenty-five years ago, Tod Lindberg and John Podhoretz, two conservative freshmen at the University of Chicago, founded Counterpoint, a publication they hoped would counter the liberal bias of the campus' student newspaper. Finding it difficult to financially sustain their publication, Lindberg and Podhoretz applied for a grant from the Institute for Educational Affairs, an organization that provided funds for conservative intellectual projects. After receiving the money, the two grateful students thanked the group for "ensur[ing] the financial survival of Counterpoint, for which we and, we daresay, the University of Chicago itself are most grateful."

Counterpoint proved to be the launching pad for careers in journalism for both Lindberg and Podhoretz: Lindberg is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and editor of Policy Review, the think tank's quarterly journal; while Podhoretz is currently a columnist with the New York Post, and the author of the recent book, "Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane."

The University of Chicago's conservative student publication also started a revolution of sorts on campuses across the country. A year later, in 1980, the Collegiate Network was formally founded by former treasury secretary William Simon, and Irving Kristol, one of the well-recognized faces of neo-conservatism, with a mission aimed at training a cadre of conservative college-age youth who would eventually transform America's media landscape.

Now, more than two decades after Simon and Kristol got the project going, a multitude of right wing ideologues including Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, Rich Lowry and Ann Coulter have become the conservative equivalent of rock stars, having successfully morphed dowdy, old-fashioned late-twentieth-century conservatism into an aggressive, hardball-playing, tough-talking, mud-slinging twenty-first century "hip" conservatism. Spawned at student newspapers supported and sustained by the Collegiate Network, these folks appear frequently on cable television's talking head programs, write for the premier right wing magazines and web sites, and produce books that spend a fair amount of time on best seller lists - Coulter easily leads in this category. Lowry is the current editor of National Review, while Ingraham hosts her own highly rated radio talk show.

The idea of conservatives creating institutions that could stand the test of time didn't start with the Collegiate Network or William Simon and Irving Kristol. Nearly a decade before the Network came into existence, Lewis F. Powell - who would soon be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon - wrote a memorandum at the request of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, warning that America's economic system was "under broad attack" by "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic." Powell's 1971 memo proved to be prescient: Written against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement, the women's movement and burgeoning anti-corporate activism, Powell pointed out that the attack against corporate America and free markets were broad-based, coming from "the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians," and the attack needed to be aggressively combated.

Powell suggested that the business community "confront" this enormous challenge by building organizations that would use "careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations." In regards to governance at the nation's universities, Powell noted that the boards of trustees of universities "overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system." The media, wrote Powell, "are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the free enterprise system to survive."

Eight years later, enter The Collegiate Network. According to a People for the American Way report, the Institute for Educational Affairs (operating as The Madison Center for Educational Affairs) originally intended to "seek out promising Ph.D. candidates and undergraduate leaders, help them...establish themselves through grants and fellowships and then help them get jobs with activist organizations, research projects, student publications, federal agencies, or leading periodicals."

With start-up funding from the John M. Olin, Scaife, J.M. and Smith Richardson foundations, as well as significant contributions from such corporations Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, Ford Motor Co., General Electric, K-Mart, Mobil and Nestle, the Wilmington, Delaware-based Collegiate Network (website) hit the ground running. (In 1995, the Collegiate Network moved from Washington, DC to Wilmington, Delaware and became affiliated with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a non-profit group that was founded in 1953, "to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political and spiritual values that sustain a free and virtuous society.")

Between 1995 and 2002, the Collegiate Network received more than $4 million in grants from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundation and other right wing foundations according to MediaTransparency.org, a web site tracking the money behind conservative media.

Over the past two decades conservatives have made impressive inroads on college campuses thanks in large part to the Collegiate Network's support of more than 85 conservative student newspapers across the country. The Washington Times' Jennifer Harper recently pointed out that conservative publications have popped up at "such liberal strongholds as Harvard, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley," stimulated by the Collegiate Network's "furnishing [of] operational grants, journalistic training, editorial resources, internships and mentoring."

According to CN's web site, "By documenting questionable uses of mandatory student fees, the proliferation of politicized academic departments, and the stifling of debate through constitutionally dubious speech codes, the student reporters and editors of the Collegiate Network have helped set the terms of debate surrounding modern higher education."

"I am delighted to report that on college campuses on both coasts (and of course in 'flyover country')," writes columnist Bernadette Malone, that "there are student-run independent newspapers that are battling the America-hating political scientists, Marxist economics professors, deconstructionist English departments, feminazis, pot-smoking philosophers, Birkenstocked war protestors, and the whole migraine headache that is the Campus Left. These conservative student newspapers are veritable hatcheries for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that helped get Bush reelected."

Malone, the former editorial page editor of right wing newspaper, The Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News, proudly confesses to being "hatched in one of these conservative newspapers, the Binghamton Review." And she notes, "practically all the writers at National Review, and a few from The Weekly Standard, started as conservative writers on college campuses. Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and other fair and balanced news institutions employ former student editors of conservative newspapers."

"The rise of a conservative media counterestablishment and today's dominance of conservatism in the broader American society is no accident," CN spokeswoman Sarah Longwell recently told the Washington Times. "It came about because of the vision and dedication of those who labored over the past quarter century to win the hearts and minds of an entire generation."

These days, the Collegiate Network isn't operating in a vacuum. They've been joined by myriad right wing organizing efforts on campus by such groups as Young America's Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum Collegians, and David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom.

On Thursday, December 2, the Collegiate Network will be holding a 25th anniversary celebration dinner at the Capital Hilton in Washington, DC. Guests will include many of the organization's successful alumni. The keynote speakers include Lowry, plus William Kristol (son of Irving) and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.

Was a project of the Madison Center for Educational Affairs. Split off to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

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Collegiate Network supported member college newspapers

Laura Flanders
WorkingForChange
February 21, 2002

Strategic Influence redux

The conservative philanthropies are paying to place interns within major media institutions including USA Today and The Weekly Standard, who then in turn use the platform to push other conservative philanthropy product.

The money to pay for these internship programs is funneled through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Collegiate Network.

Read the full report >

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