Booklists, Battles and the budding western mind
The National Association of Scholars is
compiling a list of political tracts that are widely assigned. I emailed them to note that those academic clowns Eric Schlosser and Jared Diamond were notably missing from their list. One thing this brings to mind, though, is that conservatives have this silly academic notion of being tourists at the zoo, where they peer in on the academy and remark at how many stripes the zebra has or how ugly the monkeys, but they never leap over the cage and start attacking the bears in order to dominate the cage and demonstrate who is boss. They never engage, the battles always take place exterior to what is the central place, the central aspect of college: the classroom. I suppose you could secondarily claim that it's the co-ed dorms, but let's focus on that classroom. The books assigned are trash and almost all, these days, polemic tracts firmly embued with Marcuse's notion of intolerance to anything from the right. If some right-wing book is assigned, it's something mindless from Hannity or some fluff piece of trash, or something mislabeled as 'conservative' such as that awful woman Alyssa Rosenbaum's "Atlas Shrugged" - no, students are never to get what is a cogent analysis of true conservative thought. They read about the enlightenment without de Maistre, they get the revolution (so rarely even then!) without the anti-Federalists. They get wartime dissent from communists and never isolationists, critiques of capitalism from Marx and never from Catholicism and Chesterton. These are the academic battles worth fighting, not rearguard actions of an army in defeat, but standing straight up defending against the onslaught. One is reminded of Soviet General Zhukov's advance towards Berlin in April of 1945, and Himmler had what remained of the German army as the Army Group Vistula to protect Berlin from Zhukov's advance and, instead of actually engaging the oncoming hordes, the Army sat idly aside as Zhukov, wisely, avoided the army altogether and advanced towards Berlin. There was no defense, in the face of a mortal enemy there was nothing but impotence, and millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans died brutal deaths as a result. In the face of the intellectual onslaught of campuses, our 'conservative movement' is as mindless, reckless and impotent as Himmler's defense. They stand idly by and don't fight, they don't even try. The great western battles of Salamis and Thermopylae, Tours, Lepanto, Clavijo, or Trafalgar or Waterloo, our inheritance from that greatness is to stand by as our minds are corrupted from within.
Labels: academia, campuses, college, conservativism, theory
Some old ideas, some gems, from an old co-worker
Ah, my Leadership Institute days had some good ideas and some great ideas.
Below are some good ideas for campus organizing.
Original ideas for campus organizing
A weakness of our movement is that all the resources and places where attacks can be issued are within large, expensive non-profit/public policy groups. These companies rely on profits and bottom-lines just like any free enterprise corporation, the effect is a static way of thinking that usually relies on the reliable and cautious. Any employee embracing risk and pushing the envelope will find opposition and eventual removal from these dinosaur organizations. What needs to happen is for a couple low key, non attention seeking organizations to start multiple website companies and watching groups. Low budget and lack of attention will keep these active freedom fighting associations free from the status seeking, infighting and caution of the bigger groups.
Create National Conservative Student Government Parties—develop a 5-10 step program of general steps on how to win.
Act as an “Activism Consultant” for student leaders instead of club building
Teach students to make the establishment play by their own rules with innovative, fun to do, edgy tactics. Make sure that the students are not simply stuck on an issue or generality. Activism requires that there is an enemy—be it a politician, professor, administrator or student leader. Moral indignation, defiance, and the war mindset all come into play when you can articulate who the evildoer is.
Dream-build--Brainstorm with contacts on what the problem is, what they want changed and how to get there. Ask the questions, steer the activists to the “right” conclusion on how to act. Don’t tell them directly what to do if you can help it—remember that you are an advisor and organizer, not a general.
Make sure contacts do most of the work, including the planning, financing, and recruiting. Allow the contacts to have ownership of the project
Cover their victory on your website and in friendly media. The effectiveness of “smashleftwingscum.com” was it motivated contacts to push the limits
Internally, develop a “levels system” a very basic guide showing what level of development our contacts are at. It is not up to us to grow them, they need to take the initiative. This is a good way to allocate limited resources.
“Air support”—we need a list of lawyers who will do pro bono work. We should have a formal letter from one of these attorneys that we can distribute to our people saying that if their rights are violated, an investigation will be done.
Step-by-step guide (could be fashioned to fit into a semester) on how to get a professor fired/punished/impeached. We need to prove the guide works soon so we can have testimonials and issue threats to liberal campuses as needed.
“Prof-Watch” “Starting where Horowitz left off” Make a checklist of professors we want to take down. Depending on who we choose, we will need to form bonds with group leaders at those schools. This page shouldn’t be displayed on the site until we can claim a couple victories.
Media evidence--Database of streaming and downloadable audio (text needs to be provided as well) of leftist professor rants must be on the site.
Language—we must not throw angry slurs or appear out of the mainstream when attacking these professors on the website. The idea is to create a consensus among the student body and relevant community members that this professor is a pariah. Accuse professors of “indoctrinating,” “aggressively suppressing free speech,” “lewd acts of behavior,” etc. Avoid phrases like evil, scum, moonbat, etc.
Monitoring pro-freedom-on-campus legislation.
Congressional and State Government Lobbying--Similar to Freedomworks we should have students lobby Congress for legislation guaranteeing specific rights on campus. We can easily build a long list of grievances that need to be addressed.
Legislative Watch. Have a section of the site showing what pro (and anti) conservative student bills are in congress, federal and state
Donor Wars—This is territory that conservatives have only breached once that I know of. Reaching and effectively communicating with the donors who give money to a liberal college.
Testimonial--Conservative Alumni at UCLA created a community organization that educated college donors on how liberal things had gotten. This group was eventually shut down, after doing a lot of damage. We must find a way to reach the donors.
We need to pick a couple schools and find ways to reach their donors. Distributing literature about how left wing the campus faculty at football games (athletes are donors) might be the best approach.
Build a database of campus donors—and send them a direct mailing letter asking for money as we use the stories of how liberal the professors on their beloved school have become
Get media coverage of left wing professors in paper and have alumni respond.
Set up community based “Concerned Alumni of _________” This group can co-sponsor actions with us and do all kinds of things we cant do on our own, such as destroy campus reputation, lower student attendance, etc. The group can also host town hall style meetings…
Website Idea: Replicate CampusActivism.org in every way possible. Best way would be to design a rightwingactivism.org of some sort. We could use a place to upload resources, share stories, etc
Website idea: Informer’s Corner—Similar to Bureaucrash, though we can do it far better…There should be a section (modeled with a Soviet-style poster look) where conservatives living on really liberal campuses can discreetly send us messages from the underground. . These conservatives will get emboldened to take action as they play into the idea that they are a freedom fighter. It is crucial that the site be graphically and rhetorically designed to create this dynamic
Hate group list from the “Northern Poverty Legal Center.” (closely modeled after Southern Poverty Law Center) The NWLC should actively attack SDS, MEC’cha and other campus affiliated left wing scum groups. Once we develop the lawyer list of pro bono folks, this will be more feasible.
Coalition building guide—every campus student body can be broken down into groups of like minded people. LI has found that pro-life and gun groups get the most attendance. We need to develop an internal study showing what the biggest groups of ideologically similar people are, and have it broken down demographically. With that information at hand, we need to build a profile on each group—who are they, gender, major, fraternity/sorority, etc. This is NOT to be limited to political views and issue positions alone. The study should take other groupings of likeminded people into account like religious affiliation. Within the profile on each demographic, we need to determine what issues, relating to the campus, they would be influenced by. So when our organizers are choosing a tactic, they will be better able to know what enemy to choose, and what issue to incorporate. Coalitions are not fixed alliances, they are created case-by-case. The intel we collect will make who to invite to what more scientific and reliable.
Interactive Conservative Calendar that activists can upload dates of events.
Labels: campuses, college, ideas, organizing
Co-ed dorm rooms
The University of Chicago
is moving forward with co-ed dorm rooms. Libertarians will say, great, good that they let each decide their own lives. Conservatives will say, awful, that it encourages moral degradation in an environment where it's almost non-existent. However I think something else to consider is the powerplay that it represents, in that the 'rights' of the so-called 'transgendered' become so paramount that everything else gets pushed aside. College has become not only a sandbox for social engineering and experimentation, but also a proving ground for social-political warfare with competing groups angling hard to see how much they can 'get' in their four years. And with already established left-wing groups, the 'transgendered' get to see how far they can push the envelope. Society is sowing the seeds of its own divisions in its institutions of 'higher learning' and its most poignant lesson is hardball identity politics.`
Labels: campuses, college, homosexuals, leftists
Field Offices and campus organizing
I've written a few plans and considered good locations for campus organizing, and while there are always a variety of issues to consider, in an ideal world
1. Austin, TX
2. Berkeley, CA
3. Athens, GA
4. Ann Arbor, MI
5. Boston, MA
6. Madison, WI
A few other thoughts: you need someone to manage a small team in these areas, perhaps in their mid-20s, and then the best situation would be to hire 2-3 people straight out of college. The rationale for this is that you don't want these solo operations because it then either becomes a race to promote one's self above everything else, or it leads to a special brand of crazy. For me, it seems, mainly the latter. You would want to target two general types of places: those that are absolute leftist strongholds, and also cities/college towns in swing areas. This is why Austin outranks Boston, and why Madison might be better moved up the list. You want to reach people in these areas to help counteract the effect of a constant indoctrination in the classroom.
There are also some salient issues you could always organize around, issues like culture/heritage/identity, values/family/life/abortion, war/state/bureaucracy that are powerful wherever you go. It's always entertaining to see certain forced agenda topics try and take root in college, and are usually transitory. I recall one while I was an undergrad, where there was a push to be anti-gun. Well, in case you hadn't noticed, there isn't much gun crime in college and, as well, most colleges ban guns anyway. So, it's a loser of an issue. These natural, 'salient' topics, however, should prove organizable in any situation or area.
Labels: campuses, college, organizing, theory
Public Intellectuals and academic warfare
Nearing the autumn of any iota of my own relevance on the topic of academic or college organizing issues, I ran across
a John Derbyshire article on the issue of who is and is not a "public intellectual." If there was a functioning conservative movement in this country, they should start by documenting, dissecting and deconstructing the scholarship of the most prominent left-wing intellectuals. I would add Barbara Ehrenreich and Eric Schlosser to this list, and perhaps the awful Tim White, but regardless there are more left-wing ones than Derbyshire was listing in 2004. As well, the conservative movement, if it still exists, ought to find a better way to really attack the scholarship of these individuals and fight them where it matters: in the battle of ideas.
Labels: academia, college, ideas, leftists
"Tricked into" mortgages, how about tricked into colleges?
The left talks about people "tricked into mortgages" but never about investments that are almost as large, how about "tricked into college" -- young kids are sold a false bill of goods: that their careers depend on a college education. Often $40k a year later, for four years at $160k, students leave paying down a decade worth of needless debt. Colleges modify their costs and play games with their pricing, most often in racially discriminatory ways, and most of the costs are entirely wasteful on bloated bureaucracies. They also make it virtually impossible to transfer to other colleges. If Countrywide was a bit smarter, they would have decided to run Countrywide College.
Labels: college, messaging
Article: The Education Hoax
Does the price of higher education justify itself when considered against its value?
Probably not, says this recent Forbes article.
Labels: campuses, college, Economics, education
Conservatives doing it right: ISI
So, I know I'm a whiner, but I want to give effusive praise when it's well deserved: The Intercollegiate Studies Institute publishes fabulous books. The best books other than TAN/Ignatius press that is, and
their recent website/advertisement demonstrates such a powerful countercultural influence that I hope every parent sees it when deciding where to let their children attend college.
Labels: college
Tabling Part 2
So I went tabling at the request of the adviser to the pro-life group at Assumption College. It went fabulous. I printed out some great sign-up sheets I made, had a nice ten-reasons to be involved with the pro-life group collateral, and worked the table straight out of the Morton Blackwell playbook. It was fun to put those techniques and tactics to work, and also provoke some more thoughts leading to a
revision of my previous basic tabling article. In about an hour, I ended up with over 50 new contacts for the group, including at least a half-dozen pro-choicers who agreed that women deserve real choices, and wanted to help out at the local Pregnancy center. What a great day.
Labels: campuses, college, tactics, theory
Comparing Curriculums
I
found this off of slashdot, but I thought it was interesting: a way to
compare curriculums in a few science classes and business classes. I didn't care much for the specific interface, but the concept was sound. And of course I'm more interested in the Humanities, and I would add a lot more interactivity and different content to the stuff here, but it's a great start.
Labels: academia, college
5 books every college organizer should read
I was thinking about the various books that would be crucial for a college organizer to read, and as one who is not a fan of book learning as much as I am a fan of action, I thought that these five would be the best for your time not spent taking action:
1. Closing of the American Mind - Allan Bloom
2. Rules for Radicals - Saul Alinsky
3. Radical Chic - Tom Wolfe
4. I am Charlotte Simmons - Tom Wolfe
5. Dedication and Leadership - Douglas Hyde
Labels: books, campuses, college, conservativism, organizing
Natural Student Issues
For campus organizing, many of the groups doing good work on colleges are really working on esoteric and extraneous issues to what are properly understood as natural student issues. This is somewhat related to the political science terms "preferences/salience" and "popularity" meaning that the intensity of attention to one issue is different than a menu-list of issues. For instance, Newt Gingrich has his "
American Solutions" which, at times, seems a bit silly. He lists a hundred or more potential policy solutions, which I suppose is good for think-tank types. But it represents a coupling of divergent policies that are popular, but very few which are actually salient, which people are intensely interested in. For another example,
Students for Saving Social Security is a great idea, and a great group, but it's working against the natural salience on campus on a variety of what could be conservative issues. No 18-22 year old is naturally talking about social security reform. These represent strategic choices, grander than the specific tactics that some organizations use to pitch their products, their programs. As an example of another organization, perhaps as a mild critique, the
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a very fine organization, limits itself and its intellectual conservative offerings, often to a very self-selecting group of intelligent students at elite universities. Even though the masses are craving alternatives to the indoctrination they are receiving in the classroom, ISI is tactically limiting their offerings.
We should thrive on controversy, because it means that we are being read, talked about and discussed. And if we believe that conservativism represents truth, and that given a fair hearing our ideas will prevail, we should take every idea that students are curious about, and offer conservative interpretations that they won't hear elsewhere. The usual reaction from establishment types is that this will cause a recalcitrant attitude, and people's hearts will become closed, which may be true in the general population. But with the many intellectual journeys students are taking in their four years of undergraduate education, it is worth focusing on that which will excite and entice them, rather than focusing on many issues which will always bore them. I would much rather show pieces of inherently beautiful art and talk about culture and be idiotically called a racist than show an actuarial table, charts and statistics and have the entire audience asleep.
Therefore, I think there are about 9 or so natural student issues. Here they are in no particular order:
Natural Student Issues:
1. Race
2. Culture and Identity
3. Bureaucracy
4. Tuition
5. Jobs and future careers
6. Feminism and Gender
7. Homosexuality
8. Community and Greek Life
9. War and Global Conflicts
Labels: campuses, college, conservativism, organizing, philosophy, strategy, tactics
