Inside Higher Ed: Mobilizing the Campus Right
We shouldn’t have to have this conference,” Roger Custer, director of the National Conservative Student Conference, said in an interview Monday after delivering the meeting’s opening address. “But these students are so isolated on campus.”
In its 28th year, the Young America’s Foundation annual college student gathering is a well-established Washington tradition — with roughly 400 attendees and a speaker list including Newt Gingrich, Robert Novak and David Brooks. Still, speakers talk with a marked sense of urgency.
There is little tolerance for the conservative viewpoint on campus, panelist after panelist agreed. The charge of a liberal slant in academe is nothing new, but the assertion found new life in each speech. The sense of victimization shone through in the organizers’ description of the conference as a place for students to “learn about conservative ideas and how to advance them in the face of liberal hostility.”
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