Word: yaf
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Today's college kids were quite young when Reagan was President, but thanks to YAF, ISI and the Leadership Institute--all helmed by Reaganites--the former President has an outsize presence on campus. Former Reagan officials Edwin Meese III (Reagan's second Attorney General), Jeane Kirkpatrick (his first U.N. ambassador) and Bay Buchanan (his first Treasurer) have all spoken on college campuses through YAF, and Reagan's son Michael raises money for the group. In 1998 it purchased the Reagans' old ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif., and now brings 1,000 students there every year to bask in Reaganiana (look...
...social conservatives and the kids like Custer who can't easily be labeled? After interviewing dozens of young conservatives over the past five months, I think the glue is more cultural than political: paradoxically, these kids see themselves as campus rebels. They believe they are "the new counterculture," as YAF official Patrick Coyle says--ridiculed by liberal professors, shouted down by student leftists and betrayed by a Republican Party afraid of alienating moderates...
...well-funded national organizations backing the young right encourage campus conservatives to see themselves as oppressed minorities. "Young America's Foundation alleviates the isolation so many young conservatives face," says a brochure for the National Conservative Student Conference. Another YAF pamphlet says its speakers "energize students in the fight for freedom on campus against radically anti-American, leftist professors...
Coyle defends YAF's to-the-barricades approach as the only way to combat a liberal advantage. "Conservatives don't control the faculty. They don't control the administration. They don't control the student government," he says. Among the conservative students I have met over the past few months, nearly every one has offered a tale of antiright bias: half a dozen kids at different schools in California and New York told me their professors had derided President Bush in class. Others complained about the proliferation of programs in women's studies, African-American studies--even labor studies--while...
Despite their victim routine, conservatives are making quick advances on even the most liberal campuses--and YAF's millions are no small reason. Take Ithaca College. When foundation officials described it to me, it sounded like a suffocating gulag. I was told that a Bay Buchanan speech had been reported to the college's Orwellian-sounding bias-related-incidents committee and that professors in the politics department openly sniggered at Republican kids in class...