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CAMPUS CULTURE
Republicans raise their profile at Brown
BY MATT RUFO

With the national Republican Party enjoying widespread success in twitting Democratic counterparts, it’s little surprise that GOP organizing has filtered down to the college level. And even at Brown University, often described as one of the most liberal campuses in the nation, a small, dedicated group of Brown conservatives is writing a new chapter in the school’s colorful history of political activity through the Brown Spectator, which they describe as a nonpartisan journal of ideas.

Typical content ranges from topics like Alan Silverman’s zealous defense of the death penalty ("The penalty has always deterred murders and it always will . . . No one who has been executed has ever killed again") to graduating senior Alex Schulman’s harsh criticism of affirmative action ("Race preference is a festering wound that promulgates distrust and tension between blacks and whites.") Beyond quoting sources like Cicero and Adam Smith, Spectator writers also enjoy criticizing liberals and Brown’s institutional bias toward liberal teachings.

"I wanted to create a conservative community at Brown," says 21-year-old junior Stephen Beale, the Spectator’s founder and editor-in-chief, "and the best way to do that is to start a magazine. That gives us a sense of appearance and continuity." Beale contrasts the Spectator with what he considers the left’s emotionally based political activism on campus. "Instead of just running out and counter-protesting all this stuff that the International Socialist Organization is doing, we really want to put things on an intellectual footing."

The local conservative movement is spawning new organizations and reviving such dormant ones as the College Republicans. "We basically took a dying club and brought it back up to normal activity," says vice president Joe Lisska, a 21-year-old junior, who hopes to get Governor Donald L. Carcieri to speak on campus. Students for Liberty, a libertarian discussion group, which was organizing a celebratory "Capitalism Day," serves economically conservative thinkers on campus, while Beale also heads Young Americans for Freedom, which rallied a pro-war viewpoint prior to the war in Iraq. (Of course, even though Brown President Ruth Simmons is widely associated with liberal values, Ivy League institutions like Brown haven’t hesitated when it comes to aggressively challenging union organizing among graduate students.)

Campus conservatives partially attribute their growing profile to the 2001 incident when a group of students hijacked a press run of the Brown Daily Herald after it published conservative provocateur David Horowitz’s inflammatory anti-slavery reparations advertisement. "Many students, including myself, became more outwardly conservative because of that incident," says Lisska. Beale laments how the impeded distribution of the BDH diminished discussion of the underlying issue. "No one was actually debating whether reparations were a good idea or not," he says.

Even with the flowering of conservative publications and groups at campuses nationwide, Lisska remains concerned that the local organizations may fade as the prime movers graduate. Brown political science professor Darrell West notes that conservative groups have emerged locally before, "but they’ve never really lasted long or developed very deep roots on campus."

How does a vaunted bastion of liberalism respond to comments such as junior Nicolas Ciarcia’s contention in the Spectator that, "Ending double-taxation of corporate profits will remove a serious handicap to the US economy and will help the poor as much as the rich"? The Spectator has received letters of support, but hardly a negative reaction — or much of one at all. "There’s a tremendous amount of political apathy on this campus, and not just conservatives," notes Lisska. "I think in general, there’s a lot less political interest than we’re often given credit for."

The other side tends to agree. "What I view at Brown as a much bigger problem than a lack of range of opinions is a lack of opinions at all," says sophomore Ethan Ris, president of the College Democrats. Even for those students who are politically engaged, Ris says, addressing conservative viewpoints on campus "is not a priority."


Issue Date: May 30 - June 5, 2003
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