America’s campuses will be home to many familiar sights this fall: cramped dorms, unsavory cafeteria food, and lots of well-funded right-wing professors and students.
Right-wing? That’s right — at least, it’s a claim we increasingly hear from the Left. Last February, an article in The Nation by Sam Graham-Felsen reported, “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.”
To be sure, a handful of conservative groups focus their energies on colleges and universities — their mission is to loosen the Left’s iron-fisted grip on campus. Even if they did spend “more than $35 million,” their budgets would be a pittance compared to the $180 billion higher-ed industry, with its diversity officers, women’s studies programs, and tenured Marxists. As it happens, however, even this paltry figure is inflated and misleading, as a quick examination of financial records demonstrates.
The first reference to this fatuous figure of “more than $35 million” appears to be a September 2004 article written in the Boston Globe by David Halperin and Ben Hubbard, who were both then employed at the left-wing Center for American Progress. They write: “The right has built a powerful campus machine. A dozen right-wing institutions now spend $38 million annually pushing their agenda to students….The largest groups — Young America’s Foundation, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Leadership Institute — spent roughly $25 million on campuses last year.” But a simple side by side comparison of Halperin’s and Hubbard’s figures with publicly available tax records of this right-wing triumvirate reveals that a significantly smaller amount of money is being spent on campuses.
Let’s take a close look at these three groups.
Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Founded in 1953 and based in Wilmington, Del., ISI is dedicated to helping conservative students and faculty engage the world of ideas. Halperin and Hubbard claim that in 2003 it “spent nearly $1 million supporting 80 conservative campus publications and $9 million publishing books and periodicals for college conservatives.” This amount is a bit high — and by “a bit,” I mean almost $9 million. According to ISI’s publicly accessible tax forms, the organization spent $688,163 that year on books and cassettes, as well as $570,831 on printing and publications for program services during 2003. The latter figure includes the total amount spent on ISI periodicals, as well as the amount in grants given to ISI’s national consortium of conservative student-papers, the Collegiate Network. To give some perspective on how much conservative college journalists actually receive from conservative benefactors, it is safe to say that the $340,873 spent in 2003 by a lone “mainstream” college paper, The Harvard Crimson, was more than ISI spent on grants to conservative student papers nationwide.
“Obviously we’re scaring them, which is why they’re inflating our numbers,” says Steve Klugewicz, director of ISI’s Collegiate Network. In addition to funding conservative publications, ISI sponsors debates and conferences and also provides academic, journalistic, and charitable grants. (One ISI fellowship recipient will use her radical right-wing funding to “create an innovative home for the elderly in her native New York City.”) The total budget for ISI was actually $8.4 million in 2003, but a total budget includes the cost of things like fundraising, rent, postage, and office supplies — expenses hardly representative of how much money is spent “on campuses,” as the authors claim in their article. While some guesswork is involved in determining on-campus expenses, it is reasonable to exclude all fundraising and management costs, as well as costs like accounting fees and depreciation. Tallying additional expenses like honoraria, travel, conferences, scholarships, and the cost of employees providing program services yields a figure of about $5.7 million spent on campus in 2003.
Young America’s Foundation: Founded in the late 1960s and based in Herndon, Va., and Santa Barbara, Calif., YAF sponsors conservative speakers, hosts national conservative student conferences, and offers resources for conservative activists and aspiring journalists. David Halperin, now the director of Campus Progress, tells NRO that YAF spent $10.4 million on campus in 2003, according to a Center for American Progress report based on IRS tax forms. To Halperin’s and Hubbard’s credit, this figure is only about $1 million more than the actual total expenses for YAF in 2003, which, again, includes overhead costs like fundraising and depreciation. YAF President Ron Robinson tells NRO, “At least half of our budget is for preserving President Reagan’s ranch in California and for acquiring and remodeling the center in Santa Barbara.” Investments in infrastructure surely help students, but it is somewhat misleading to give the impression that millions of dollars are being funneled directly to campuses. The only thing that Halperin and Hubbard write about YAF is that it funds speakers, but just shy of $750,000 was paid for lectures and speakers’ honoraria to deliver a few hundred talks in 2003. That’s about the cost of 20 Michael Moore lectures, which usually are paid for entirely by student fees. About $3.6 million is a much more reasonable estimate of money spent on campus in 2003.
Leadership Institute: Founded in 1979 and based in Arlington, Va., LI trains conservative activists techniques for success, boasting the likes of Karl Rove and Grover Norquist as graduates. Halperin tells NRO that LI spent $6.2 million on campus in 2003. That amount accurately reflects LI’s total budget, but, in addition to overhead costs, a good portion of LI’s programming is spent training grassroots activists and aspiring Capitol Hill staffers. Morton Blackwell, president of LI, tells NRO that it’s “fair to say that college students constitute close to half of the people we train.” Therefore, only half of the $3.2 million actually spent on program services like conferences, travel, publications, and employees should be considered “on campus” spending.
Thus ISI, LI, and YAF actually spent about $11 million on campuses in 2003 — about $1 per undergraduate student in America.
In addition to similarly inflating the budgets of other organizations, Halperin’s and Hubbard’s report double counts an inflated $1 million budget for the Collegiate Network and attributes $400,000 to the Independent Women’s Forum (which did not have a campus program in 2003). In 2003, The Fund for American Studies and Institute for Humane Studies awarded a combined $1.5 million in grants and spent another $4.5 million on costs like employees, travel, housing, and conferences. Specifically, this money financed such radical right-wing projects as academic endeavors in classical liberal arts and internships in government and journalism available to students regardless of ideology. David Halperin tells NRO, however, that IHS and TFAS “tend to oppose multicultural education,” thus making them right-wing sugar daddies. After tacking on these expenses and those from the smaller organizations included by Halperin and Hubbard, a more reasonable estimate reveals that the Right, broadly speaking, spent about $18.5 million in 2003 on campus, less than half of what Halperin and Hubbard claim.
However, Halperin defends his report and its methodology. He tells NRO that including an organization’s overhead costs is not misleading because “without those overhead costs, organizations couldn’t give the direct support to campuses that they do.” While he did not have a response to the claims that he wrongly included the Independent Women’s Forum and double-counted the Collegiate Network, he says that his report actually under-represents what the Right spends on campus because “it does not include organizations like the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Students for Saving Social Security, and the College Republicans.”
It is true that conservatives now have a vibrant network of organizations, almost all of which cited here have a good or excellent rating from CharityNavigator.org, reflecting a high percentage of funds going toward programming. Funding for conservative students has continued to increase in the past few years, and conservative benefactors should be proud of the invaluable opportunities and resources they provide to students through YAF, ISI, LI, and other groups. (Full disclosure: I receive a stipend from ISI’s Collegiate Network while interning at National Review and give thanks for generous conservative benefactors every day I walk into the office — and especially at lunchtime when I visit the neighborhood hot-dog street vendor, knowing that my unpaid friends on Capitol Hill are subsisting on mere peanut butter and jelly or Ramen noodles.) But, the point is that the Left is fixated on inflating the strength of the Right, perhaps to convince liberals like Campus Progress’s rich uncle George Soros to cut it a fat check. Indeed, Halperin’s and Hubbard’s alarmist article and others like it seem like little more than fundraising letters to help fill the war chests of new left-wing campus organizations. Moreover, the idea that conservatives have become dominant in academia because of their campus organizations is about as preposterous as the notion that conservatives control the media because of Rush Limbaugh.
Compared to the multibillion dollar liberal academic establishment, conservative efforts seem quite modest. Yet Halperin says, “I wish some of these dire stories that conservatives tell about the politics on campus had more truth to them.” Perhaps the students who will have their groups defunded, newspapers stolen, and grades lowered this year because of their political or religious beliefs would beg to differ with Halperin and other pouting progressives who claim that conservatives are the ones controlling American campuses.
– John McCormack was the Collegiate Network intern for NR in Washington, D.C. this summer.