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Features > October 22, 2003

Supporting Young Thinkers

By Mischa Gaus

Without consistent funding progressive student publications struggle.

Right-wing foundations understand how to create dedicated ideologues. They target budding freshmen conservatives from their move-in day and support their progeny up through—and beyond—their TV talking-head appearances.

“They teach them how to frame arguments in ways that serve their political purposes,” says Jeremy Smith, founder of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Alternative Journalism Project (CAJP). This project seeks to provide progressives the same kind of strategic success that conservative groups, which created right-wing campus media, have enjoyed. But for progressives, says Smith, “it is not simply propagandizing but creating a culture of dissidence and criticism.”

Marlena Gangi, editor of Portland State University’s Rearguard, agrees. “That’s what’s different about us,” she says. “We’re not just writing about it, we’re out there in the streets. … If you are passionate and consistent enough, you can get the word out.”

While conservative groups like the Collegiate Network pour nearly $1 million a year into starting and sustaining right-wing campus publications, lefty college ’zines struggle on without thousands of foundation dollars.

Roughly half of these scrappy publications survive on student-fee money, making them easy targets for conservative campus groups that attack by taking over student finance committees or pressuring administrators to stop funding political speech. The rest scrape by with garage sales, benefit concerts, even their own cash: not an easy path for a publication’s longevity—or participants’ morale.

But the biggest challenge for campus publications is student turnover. This is an issue for conservative papers, too, but their strong infrastructure maintains the quality of their papers over time. The CAJP is trying to find funds to hold conferences and training sessions to help progressive campus publications improve standards and tactics, thereby increasing credibility and consistency. “A lot of them are operating in this vacuum, making it up as they go along,” Smith says. The group hopes to fill that void with practical resources to teach campus journalists how to run their publications more professionally. The group also runs a Campus Alternative Journalism Awards program to raise awareness of high-quality work.

“The hard part is motivating people to see [the paper] as a place to do serious, analytical work, and convince them not just to give in and watch Fox TV,” says Kate Sheppard, managing editor of Buzzsaw Haircut, Ithaca College’s alternative paper. Gangi says juggling school, jobs, activism and deadlines also is tough for her writers.

Campus publications and support networks like CAJP need philanthropic support because other sources are too unstable, yet foundations provide few funds to continually infuse progressive media with fresh blood. Such funding for radical campus publications is complicated, moreover, because tax-exempt nonprofits are not allowed to fund strictly political work, despite conservatives’ obvious flouting of the law.

“Do we cheat, too, or do we forever consign ourselves to losing the discourse debate?” asks Rob Levine, editor of mediatransparency.org.

The funding crisis in lefty campus publications mirrors the perennial poverty of their older siblings, like The Progressive, The Nation, Bitch and Z Magazine. Experience and a deepened commitment to progressive media could be fostered through apprenticeships. Most left-wing publications offer internships, but very few have sufficient funds to pay interns even a modest wage, let alone provide fellowships. This further limits structured opportunities for emerging writers who can’t afford to work for free.

“We can’t afford it,” says Bitch publisher Lisa Jervis. “I wish we could, but there’s a lot of things I wish about our budget.”

Progressive policy think tanks also offer fewer and less lucrative research opportunities than their conservative counterparts. The Heritage Foundation, by contrast, offers 50 paid internships each summer.

Consequently, would-be deep thinkers are forced to work in other fields, the left’s idea pipeline leaks, and fewer smart composers are trained to counter Washington’s one-note tunes.
Mischa Gaus is a freelance writer based in Chicago.

More information about Mischa Gaus

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  • Reader Comments

    yes! corporate shills and republicans have completely dominated the professorships of most universities. what do you think they’re “teaching”?!

    it’s pathetic that students actually pay to listen to this drivel. only the students and they’re work (i.e. papers, college radio, etc.) can combat this shill.

    the children and the students are our future. support their cause.

    Posted by jt on Oct 22, 2003 at 9:40 PM

    Greetings,
    This notion is exactly the kind of activity the ‘left’ must begin to consider seriously.  We’ve given up the turf to the reactionaries and they have taken over. How can we be surprised?

    Its time to find new ways to resist in the _public sphere_; we have to do the groundwork, just like they do.  We need to confront them on their own ground and respond openly and with integrity to the lies, disiformation, and mystification. 
    The only problem with this idea is that money controls who gets air time.  Thus, we have to fall back on old methods; door to door organizing; neighborhood rallies; education programs for those cut off by the Machine from layoffs, downsizing, etc.  We need to get back in their faces, folks!  Its past time.

    Posted by ryokan on Oct 23, 2003 at 2:06 AM

    The problems of the left are not just the lack
    of support we give the students, but also how they
    present their side. The left, for some reason, has
    taken up stance of talking down to very people
    we need to be talking with. The middle class
    workers and the poor. They embrace such scholars
    as Noam Chumsky and Howard Fisk and look down
    on anyone who is not completely familiar with
    them. The left is too satisfied with intelecualizing
    a problem, rather than just telling it like it is.
    Stop “preaching to the chior” and start talking to
    the people and students in a way that they understand,
    about those things that the people feel the most
    strongly about. That is where the “right” has been
    beating the “left”. Use language that the people
    understand, not some “pie in the sky” concept that
    only someone with a Masters Degree can comprehend.
    We need more Harry Trumans types. People who are
    willing to shoot from the hip, so to speak.

    Posted by Chris on Oct 24, 2003 at 10:24 PM

    Interesting. I write for a Labor Paper and you’d think we’d have progressives and those who work for an hourly wage reading our material and embracing the very fine work we do to expose the corporate BS. (I recently did a researched piece on Walmart and how little you really save by shopping there. And how the company damages local economies. I had ONE person commennt on the article.)

    Most times when I call workers/people to write articles about them and their ‘successes’ and so forth I almost always get a cold shoulder. Why? They’d rather be written about in a mainstream medium. Even when they know that media will NEVER present their story framed from a worker’s point of view.

    So like most things American it’s all about celebrity and the path to that lies in mainstream media.

    Posted by Chris Stevens on Oct 27, 2003 at 1:27 PM

    It is sad that the left is castigated for ‘intellectualising’ problems which suggests that the right are too stupid to consider intellectual problems. It is possible to tell it like it is in an intellectual way without stooping to rhetoric and bushisms about good and evil and how the poor must be crushed.  In their own minds the right think they are beating the left but those minds are too simple to understand the real arguments.

    Posted by intellectual on Oct 28, 2003 at 8:48 AM

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