GIVE US THE CHILD, WE'LL GIVE YOU THE MAN

The Young Hipublicans (JOHN COLAPINTO, May 25, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

The mission of today's college conservatives is, in many respects, no different from what it was in [David] Brock's day, and even [William] Buckley's. But today's movement also differs markedly from ones that came before. Influenced as much by the mood and mores of MTV as it is by the musings of Allan Bloom, today's movement has shaped itself around a new demographic of young right-wingers, one that includes a heavy contingent of women and that draws some of its fiercest ideologues from the middle class. Having spread beyond traditionally conservative hotbeds like Dartmouth, it's a movement that operates in an atmosphere that did not even exist when Buckley and [Dinesh] D'Souza were undergraduates: campuses governed by speech and behavior codes introduced more than a decade ago. A result is a new breed of college conservative, one poised to inherit the responsibility of shaping the Republican Party in the years to come.

The Bucknell University Conservatives Club has its origins in the fall of 1999, when a freshman named Tom Elliott arrived on campus. His father is Bently Elliott, former director of speechwriting for Ronald Reagan. Growing up in Alexandria, Va., and attending Easter-egg hunts on the White House lawn, Tom Elliott absorbed by osmosis the central tenets of conservatism: smaller government, less taxes, more military spending, welfare reform, no abortion on demand. He'd never questioned his right-wing beliefs until he entered Bucknell, where, he says, he found his ideas coming under attack from his professors.

''In my spare time, I started visiting conservative Web sites,'' he says, ''so I could arm myself.'' In his sophomore year, he wrote right-wing columns in the student paper, The Bucknellian. Styling himself after his journalistic heroes, like Hunter S. Thompson, Elliott strove for an in-your-face attitude in his writing and came to enjoy his status as the campus's provocateur. But it was not until the summer after his sophomore year that he called on his contacts with conservative interest groups, like the Leadership Institute, to move on his idea of starting a conservatives club and his own right-wing campus newspaper. Elliott enlisted a fellow Bucknell sophomore, Michael Boland, a square-jawed evangelical Christian from Cooperstown, N.Y., the only other ''out'' conservative on campus at the time.

It was, in many respects, an odd marriage. Elliott, a hard-partying frat boy from a privileged background, fits a common stereotype of the college conservative of the 1980's: affluent, confident, connected (his father is a Bucknell alumnus and trustee). When Elliott offers that he ''doesn't take school too seriously, and my grades reflect it,'' you know he's telling you that he doesn't have to worry too much about a career and money (after graduating this month, he plans to ''travel and maybe write a book in the future''). Mike Boland, by contrast, is like many of today's young right-wingers. Determinedly middle class (his dad is an X-ray technician, his mom a teacher's aide), Boland can afford Bucknell's $35,000 in tuition and fees only with the help of financial aid. Studious and abstemious, he works hard to keep up a 3.9 G.P.A. For Boland, the effort that has taken him from a modest background to the top ranks of an elite university bolsters his conservative beliefs on self-reliance. ''If you don't earn it,'' he says, ''you don't appreciate it.''

Boland agreed to join Elliott in starting Bucknell's conservatives club. The two don't agree on every issue (Elliott is against capital punishment; Boland supports it), and they often clash when it comes to how best to spread their message (Elliott likes to use satire and ridicule to raise hackles; Boland prefers close reasoning), but the two share a mind-set common to virtually every college conservative you meet. They describe themselves as defenders of ''individuality'' and ''freedom'' against a campus, and world, overrun by groupthink liberalism and pious political correctness. They also share a belief that despite the common perception of youth being synonymous with progressive, liberal ideals, the true spirit of their generation is solidly, if quietly, conservative.

The polls bear this out. According to the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute, which has been tracking the attitudes of incoming freshmen at hundreds of colleges nationwide since 1966, student conservatism is increasing in many areas. Asked their opinion about casual sex, 51 percent of freshmen were for it in 1987; now 42 percent are. In 1989, 66 percent of freshmen believed abortion should be legal; today, only 54 percent do. In 1995, 66 percent of kids agreed that wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes; now it's down to 50 percent. Even on the issue of firearms, where students have traditionally favored stiffer controls, there has been a weakening in support for gun laws. ''We're at a record low on this item,'' says the U.C.L.A. Institute's associate director, Linda Sax, an associate professor of education at U.C.L.A. ''We've seen a decline over the last four consecutive years.''

Yet according to Sax, this conservative trend on issues does not necessarily mean that students call themselves right-wingers, or even Republicans. ''Students' opinions of particular issues are not always in line with their own self-placement on an ideological spectrum,'' she says.

Still searching for their identities, many of these kids are not yet prepared to declare a particular political affiliation. This is where the conservative campus activists come in. Having recognized the importance of conservativism to their own lives, they have committed themselves to the task of bringing out the unacknowledged conservatism in other students. The mission of today's activists involves less an act of persuading their peers to accept an ideology than in awakening them to the fact that they already embody it.

One of the more interesting effects of this--though I only know of this anecdotally, and statistics may not bear it out--is the flight from the humanities into the sciences on campus. Departments like English and History are so rotten with leftovers 60s types that students find it easier just to not take the courses they teach and instead opt for courses of study that are less politicized and unradicalized. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2003 5:49 AM