Word: yaf
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...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...
...outside the radical pocket of that department, the Ithaca College Republicans--with YAF help--have begun to change the campus in the four years since Roger Custer founded the G.O.P. organization. "They are the most visible group on campus now," says Braeden Sullivan, a former co-president of one of the college's gay groups, BIGAYLA. "They don't have the biggest group of people"--in fact, only about 15 students regularly go to Ithaca College Republican meetings--"but they are definitely the most visible group, and that's a big change from a couple years...
Custer, a blond, round-faced Californian, first attended a YAF conference in 1999, when he was still in high school. Afterward, he followed the organization's playbook to the letter. During black-history month his freshman year, for instance, he brought black libertarian Reggie Jones to campus. Barlas perfectly played her role by refusing to help fund the hip-hip promoter's speech, even though her department was paying for other black-history-month speakers. Her reasoning was that Jones "does not, from all appearances, support ... the vision that gives this month its political meanings." Custer was then able...