Also, he might have added, educated in how the power of the pen can be leveraged by the power of the purse. His scoop would have likely joined the piles of the ignored and the unread without the backing of L&T’s publisher – the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Inc., a $3.5 million conservative organization dedicated to purging “the pervasive forces of multiculturalism” from the nation’s campuses.
Yale is not ISI’s only target. It is one of six campuses-among them Princeton, Stanford and Duke–that ISI has targeted for liberal excesses. The institute is part of a national network of conservative organizations that produces books and campus publications, sponsors conservative speakers and offers graduate fellowships. When ISI was founded in 1958 (William E Buckley Jr., Yale ‘50, was its first president), secular humanism was its main target. But multiculturalism, and all those “kooky concepts from the 60s,” according to one Yale grad, have proven to be more popular enemies. Membership has more than doubled in the last five years, growing to 55.000 on 1,100 campuses. Besides publishing, ISI pays hefty speaking fees: it paid Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative best-selling author, $174,000 in 1993.
ISI’s strategy is direct, and effective. It pays for publications to expose the political sins of a college – “trendy” courses in feminist studies, for example. Coordinating conferences and mass mailings from its Bryn Mawr, Pa., headquarters, ISI distributes the stories to select alumni, urging them to fight hack, The grads, in turn, withhold their annual donations–and funnel the cash to ISI instead. The result is that controversial decisions on campus can be disproportionately influenced by wealthy, and most often conservative, alumni. These graduates, says ISI Vice President Chris Long, should know that “students spend their time in Contemporary Lesbian Arts . . . watching movies like “Fierce Love’ or “Naked Breath.’ How useful is that?”
At Yale, the ISI process worked with precision. Collins’s story on the Bass gift was edited by instructors at D.C.’s National Journalism Center, run by an ISI trustee. In November, ISI sent L&T to 5,000 Yale alums and leaked the story to The Wall Street Journal. Within months, the school lost at least $20 million in withheld pledges. Bass remained in contact with ISI while talking things over with Yale president Richard Levin, and by February, Levin had agreed to return the money. Bass and LeVin also agreed to issue a joint announcement, but the news was leaked to the Journal first. NEWSWEEK has learned that the week before the Journal story appeared, Long and ISI’s president, T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., flew to Texas to help Bass write a solo press release to coincide with the Journal’s scoop. “It’s unfortunate but inevitable that friends must disagree from time to time,” Levin explained later. Cribb was less diplomatic. “The refunding of the Bass gift will serve as a wake-up call,” he said.
At Stanford, members of ISI’s campus organization (Winds of Freedom) recently won a lawsuit on free-speech grounds against the school’s 1990 code forbidding “hate speech.” Winds director Adam Ross says that by this summer, he hopes to have cloned Yale’s coup “1,000 times over.” ISI is publishing a book in August: “Caliban’s Kingdom: Stanford’s Experiment With Multiculturalism.” The book charges that “politicized” classes and student activities have led to an ironic intolerance on campus – intolerance of all things Western. Says Ross, “If just a few pages in a magazine caused the Bass affair, imagine how much damage a whole book could do!”
In Spartanburg, S.C., ISI took credit for ousting Converse College’s first woman president two years ago. During her tenure at the liberal-arts school, Ellen Hall was criticized for a variety of things, from making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a campus holiday to pushing for courses in Latin American studies. Long held meetings with alums to steer their ouster campaign. Even though one third of Converse’s student body signed a letter in Hall’s defense, the alums were able to force Hall’s resignation by using a sophisticated public-relations campaign. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, one graduate accused Hall of wearing “god-awful clothes.”
Shoestring student organizations can barely compete. At Yale, ISI gives conservative groups nearly twice as much money as the college gives to all its student groups combined. The appeal of the right-wing life comes not only with clout but also with material comforts. “If you work on a conservative paper, you get wined and dined in Washington,” says Evan McKenzie, a political-science professor at the University of Illinois who’s tracked the flow of conservative foundation money since 1980. Collins, the Yale reporter. now counts Arthur Laffer and William Buckley among his friends and mentors. And ISI foots his bill at Mory’s, the old-boys’ club in New Haven. First he landed a Bass, now an expense account.
