Right Wing Spends Millions Funding College Conservative Groups

That's a question the Center for Campus Organizing set out to answer four years ago. The result of its research is the recently published manual, "Uncovering the Right on Campus: A Guide to Resisting Conservative Attacks on Equality and Social Justice."

The answer?

"The left remains strong on college campuses," says Bill Capowski, executive director of the center. "But the difference is that conservative campus groups are far more organized, have more resources and work together on like agendas."

"When I was a student activist at MIT in the mid-1980s, our counterparts on the right received political training," writes Rich Cowan, project coordinator for CCO.

"The larger motive was to groom young people for future leadership positions. Ralph Reed's 'stealth tactics' did not start with his Christian Coalition efforts to take over school boards; they started years earlier with College Republicans President Ralph Reed's campaign to take over liberal student governments."

For example, according to the study, Michigan's conservative Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, with assets exceeding $130 million, made $85,000 in campus grants in the 1994-95 academic year. And Michigan's Earhart Foundation, nearly one-third the size of the DeVos foundation, donated $87,000 to campus organizations in the same year. All told, conservative foundations have been funding campus groups to the tune of $10 million to $20 million a year since the 1980s, say the authors of the report.

It's that kind of financial wherewithal which is supporting more than 60 "right-wing campus publications reaching almost a million students" and allowing organizations to conduct seminars, sponsor lectures, organize training programs for young conservatives and even provide "legal and financial support for students fighting progressive groups or campus administrations," say the book's editors. They say that the purpose of the study is to inform local activists who might otherwise be isolated or silenced by this conservative backlash, and to help those outside the university to look behind the red-herring issues of "tenured radicals," "lower standards" and "political correctness" in higher education.

In addition to providing research on conservative funding trends on campus, Uncovering the Right on Campus doubles as a "how-to" manual on how students can counter the conservative tide, from how to track the flow of funds to colleges and universities to "Rules for Engaging the Right."

In the face of the revelations of the study, the Center for Campus Organizing, which was established in 1992 to support social justice activism and alternative journalism on campus, remains optimistic: "Despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the right to turn back the clock to the '50s, they are not winning our generation," say the editors. "Most students want more money spent on education, not war; most women are not abandoning their careers, and multiculturalism and the gay rights movement are gaining ground."