Campus Conservatives

In the 1950s, U.S. college students were deemed to be a "silent generation" of "apathetes" who burrowed in "privatism" like gophers with tired blood. Looking at their "closed, watchful" faces, one professor howled: "My God, feel something! Get enthusiastic about something, plunge, go boom, look alive!"

Last year they went boom. Fueled by the spark of Southern Negro sit-in strikers, Northern students picketed Woolworth stores and "marched" on Washington. Others denounced everything from dull teaching and nuclear testing to compulsory R.O.T.C. and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Last fall both presidential candidates drew enormous crowds of students. For ex-gophers, the trend is "involvementism," and the most startling part of it is a sharp turn to the political right. As Editor Peter Stuart of the Michigan Daily puts it: "The signs point to a revival of interest in individualism and decentralization of power--principles espoused by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and rekindled by Senator Barry Goldwater." Items:

P: Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative is selling best at 200 college-town bookstores across the land.

P: Youngsters, not oldsters, were the most exuberant Goldwater boomleteers at the Republican presidential convention.

P: Harvard's newly re-elected Student Council President Howard Phillips, 19, is a stern conservative on a campus brimming with Democrats on the faculty.

P: In last fall's mock election at the University of Michigan, Nixon defeated Kennedy, though Kennedy easily carried the state. At Indiana, Northwestern and Ohio State, Nixon won by 2 to 1.

Exodus Shrugged. The campus conservatives subdivide into roughly three groups. On the far right is a small fringe of shouting, demonstrating fanatics who admire the late Joe McCarthy, favor colonialism, back such causes as the "right" to exclude Negroes from certain neighborhoods, demand that students sign loyalty oaths, picket the movies Spartacus and Exodus because Dalton Trumbo (TIME, Jan. 2) wrote them. They take as their philosopher Novelist Ayn (Atlas Shrugged) Rand, who for a brooch wears a gold dollar sign to symbolize the values of selfcenteredness. On the other end of the spectrum are Kennedy supporters who find in the President's appeal to duty ("Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country") the essence of their conservatism.

In the middle of this stream runs the strongest current. Its members stand for the old verities, which they think the U.S. has forgotten. "Man has free will and reason," says Victor Milione, 36, executive vice president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. "Individual men should be their own agents in all things respecting their own lives." These conservatives hold the right of private property as the best bulwark of freedom. They argue that unemployment should be alleviated by charity; that children should obey the Biblical command to honor parents by caring for them in their old age instead of leaving the responsibility to the Social Security Administration.

High Birth Rate. The measure of the new conservatism is the birth rate of right-wing campus organizations, or the growth of old ones. Milione's Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, founded in 1953 to combat campus socialists, now has a national mailing list of 12,000 confirmed conservatives for its literate newsletter, the Individualist. Young Americans for Freedom, founded last fall as a political action partner to the philosophical Individualists, now has 21,000 members on 115 campuses. Last month Y.A.F. took in 805 new members, demonstrated in Washington in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee--outnumbering demonstrators who opposed the committee. Yale's conservative Calliopean Society, nurtured by that angry Yale Locke, William F. Buckley Jr., author of the apopemptic God and Man at Yale and now editor of the National Review, has a waiting list. Buckley himself has become the polemicist who sallies forth to slay the liberal likes of Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.*

At the University of Wisconsin, long a fount of extreme liberalism, the four-year-old Conservative Club is a deliberately "small and articulate" group of 45 icon smashers. Members must not only master the works of conservative writers but also the art of meticulous grooming. In contrast to sweatered classmates, they wear suits and ties to class, which also sets them apart from liberal professors in old sports jackets.

Against Conformity. Students offer many reasons for turning conservative, but one is repeated over and over. Poet Robert Frost once wrote, "I never dared be radical when young. For fear it would make me conservative when old." The new trend is youth's natural rebellion against conformity, and to many the liberalism of their New Deal-bred elders is the most ironbound conformity. "My parents thought Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest heroes who ever lived," says the Y.A.F. chairman, Yale Law Student Robert Schuchman, 22. "I'm rebelling from that concept." Says President Roger Claus of Wisconsin's Conservative Club: "You walk around with your Goldwater button, and you feel the thrill of treason." One big persuader is professorial pressure of "liberalism, liberalism, liberalism --the most illiberal thing that students meet on campus," says English Professor Bennett Weaver, sponsor of the Y.A.F. chapter at the University of Michigan.

The likeliest recruits, he adds, "are inclined to be sensibly clean people, not liberal and dirty people." Whatever they are, they all have things on their minds. Wisconsin's Roger Claus pumps for nuclear bomb testing: "We should stop this neurotic brooding, brush the fallout off our lapels and stand up to the Russians in the great heritage of this country." But at the University of Chicago, Conservative Roger Hamowy favors disarmament in the interests of "freedom," because then the Government would be forced to cut taxes.

Conservatives are no longer a tiny minority, and they are a growing goad to campus "involvementism." At Harvard last week, for example, undergraduate Republicans launched a new magazine. Advance, aimed at what Publisher Bruce K.

Chapman, 20, calls a balanced "social progress within the free enterprise system." Its readership, says Chapman, will be the "flaming moderates" of U.S. campuses, and he thinks he has a big field.

* The two debated last week at Newton (Mass.) College of the Sacred Heart. Schlesinger, who is now a special assistant to President Kennedy, said that the development of the welfare state in the U.S. was "the best security against Communism." Buckley argued that the welfare state was "a danger inside a person because it controls his thinking."

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