Whole Life Times: Attack of the Killer Hipublicans

February 2005

Attack of the Killer Hipublicans

by Eliza Thomas

What, you mean you haven’t heard of the Hipublicans? That cool new youth movement of edgy, trendy, hipster alt-conservatives? According to hipublican.com (tagline: “Hip. Conservative. On Point”), their ranks are teeming with the hottest young celebrities like Britney Spears, former MTV VJ Kennedy and the redhead from That ’70s Show.

Aside from a new look, an updated marketing campaign and a few B-list spokespeople, the young Republicans of today are armed with some serious financial backing—$20 million a year from assorted conservative groups—and they’re organized for assault on a campus near you. Writes Washington Post Writers Group columnist Ellen Goodman, “While many of us assume that the right is busily targeting the highest court as its last unoccupied power base, a whole subset of conservatives is after higher education.”

Whereas liberal student groups on campus generally organize around actual causes, like protesting the war in Iraq or ending sweatshop labor, student conservative groups organize against perceived campus liberalism. Conservatives have long leerily regarded academia as one of the last liberal strongholds, and two recent studies seem to support their conviction. The first, a survey of 1,000 academics, indicates that in the humanities and social sciences there are seven Democrats for every Republican, 30-to-1 in anthropology and even 3-to-1 in economics. A second study shows that on the faculties at Stanford and Berkeley, Dems outnumber their counterparts 9-to-1. And the Center for Responsive Politics reports that the biggest donors to the Kerry campaign were employees from Harvard and the University of California.

Well-publicized stats like these have served to energize conservatives’ claims of campus “liberal bias,” a term that right-wing student activists have adopted as their slogan. In this way, conservatives have proclaimed themselves the new campus minority and are deliberately using the language of liberalism—words like diversity, pluralism and inclusion—to further their agenda. “Those behind the trend call it an antidote to the overwhelming liberal dominance of university faculties,” reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “But many educators, while agreeing that students should never feel bullied, worry that they just want to avoid exposure to ideas that challenge their core beliefs—an essential part of education.”

To many in higher education, young Hipublican activism is something more disturbing than just a new turn in the campus debate. Unlike other student groups, campus conservatives are often trained and financed by deep-pocketed seasoned strategists with the ultimate goal of hard-right reformation. Their presence on campus “puts a chill in the air,” said Joe Losco, a professor of political science at Indiana’s Ball State University, to the Chicago Sun-Times. “Faculty retrench. They are less willing to discuss contemporary problems, and I think everyone loses out.” Professor Losco supported two colleagues who had been targeted for alleged bias through their ordeal.

At California State University, Long Beach, Dr. Clifton Snider, poet, novelist, literary critic and Professor of English suffered his own ordeal at the hands of the more rabid campus conservative movement. Last semester, a student in his English 100 class took offense to perceived liberal bias in his syllabus and to politically liberal opinions he expressed in class. Instead of utilizing the methods Cal State has in place for students to formally lodge complaints against professors, Snider’s student registered her grievance online with Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), a particularly bloodthirsty conservative group with close ties to infamous right-wing agitator David Horowitz. With chapters on 135 college campuses, Students for Academic Freedom regularly advertises in campus publications calling on students to report professors who try to “impose their political opinions” in the classroom.

After posting on the SAF site, Dr. Snider’s student’s complaint against him spread like wildfire through the internet’s virtual right-wing. The accusing student was tapped to publish a piece railing against Dr. Snider on Horowitz’s frontpagemag.com which was then picked up by the “conservative news and information site” townhall.com before making it all the way to the mothership of right-wing media, Fox News. And that is when the continuous hate mail that Dr. Snider had been enduring since the original SAF post turned to death threats.

“One of the threatening voice mails that came to my office was from a man who claimed his daughter was in my class and if I didn’t stop my ‘anti-Bush agenda’ he’d hit me with a “cement brick’,” recalled Dr. Snider. “Another voice mail threatened a petition to have me removed from my position. An e-mail threatened demonstrations outside my classroom. For two class meetings I had police protection… people wrote to the president of the university, the provost, vice presidents, deans, the chair with similar hate mail, some of it demanding that I be fired. I consider myself fortunate that the university stood by me.”

Externally funded and managed conservative organizations like the Students for Academic Freedom have spearheaded similar defamation campaigns across the country, resulting in a mood on campus that is decidedly taut. The American Association of University Professors has come out publicly against SAF, triggering those on the right to once more cry discrimination.

But beyond mere public expressions of disapproval, the real left needs to put some time, attention and most importantly, dollars, into this battle for campus domination. After all, as the man said, great leaders aren’t born… and today’s young Hipublican is tomorrow’s Karl Rove.

Eliza Thomas is WLT’s Associate Editor

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