A conservative campus activist, Hollingsworth wants to free students from the greed of the “gimme gang”—the left-wing special interest student groups he believes control most college campuses. His targets are student lobby groups such as the United States Student Association (USSA), the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) and the structures erected by previous students that fund or subsidize student service programs such as child-care cooperatives. Hollingsworth objects to these liberal groups because he says they benefit relatively few students, but all students have to fund them, and because they are generally run by liberals. “There is no balance,” he says. “When you try to bring balance, the left will do anything to shut your speech down, because they are afraid of the truth.”

He’s not alone. Unlike liberals or progressives, conservatives on college campuses can draw on a national, well-funded network of right-wing organizations. Groups such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) with its Collegiate Network (CN) dispense millions of dollars in aid and guidance, raining down scholarships, fellowships, internships and other help on promising students who agree with their conservative, pro-business philosophy. These organizations bankroll conservative journals on college campuses and recruit promising young conservatives to positions of national prominence and influence.

Conservatives on college campuses can draw on a national, well-funded network of right-wing organizations.

There is no equivalent on the ideological left—no organized national movement of young Marxists or future socialists. The only national organizations comparable to those on the right are the PIRGs and a few student lobbying associations, such as USSA. While the PIRGs and USSA claim no overt partisan political agenda, their efforts have drawn the ire and fire of college conservatives nationwide. Conservatives blast USSA for its support of multicultural programs and affirmative action, and PIRGs for their pursuit of environmental and consumer protection regulation.

While Hollingsworth hasn’t received major financial aid from conservative organizations, he has learned from them and used the resources they can mobilize. He hasn’t always gotten his way at the Oregon schools he’s attended, but his successes are notable and far reaching. Thanks to his efforts, no community college in Oregon is a member of USSA. Hollingsworth also initiated a suit—now on appeal to the Ninth District Court of Appeals—that may defund Oregon’s four college PIRGs and could change the ways all student groups in Oregon are funded. “Now if we win on appeal in the Ninth Circuit Court, it will be binding in nine western states, including Hawaii and Alaska,” he says. In his wake, the survivors either adore him or hate him; almost no one who knows him is neutral.

Hollingsworth didn’t plan to become a campus activist. In 1988, he was married with a son and had a job driving a truck to Rapid City, South Dakota, twice each week. While loading a truck in Portland, he cracked his femur. His doctor misdiagnosed the problem, and Hollingsworth worked on a fractured leg for a year. He later found he’d developed aseptic necrosis, a disease that dissolves bone tissue. An operation stopped the disease, but left him too disabled to drive a truck or engage in other types of manual labor. His old life was over.

Hollingsworth likes to say he was liberal—even progressive—in his outlook before he entered Lane Community College (LCC). While he won’t say exactly when he changed his mind, he does give credit to the man who influenced him most, social science instructor Greg Delf. To this day, Hollingsworth believes Delf is one of only two conservative instructors he’s had in seven years of school. And Delf introduced him to ISI.

Founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, ISI is the oldest national college conservative organization in the country. The organization has an annual budget of $4.7 million and claims more than 55,000 student and faculty members on U.S. campuses. Its current president, T. Kenneth Cribb, served as chief of domestic affairs for President Reagan. In 1995, the organization assumed control of the Collegiate Network, which funds more than 50 conservative college publications, ranging from the Harvard Salient to the Dartmouth Review to the Oregon Commentator.

ISI’s first president was William F. Buckley, Jr. A seminal figure in American conservatism, Buckley is largely responsible for bringing together three separate threads in postwar conservative philosophy: 1950s anti-Communist paranoia, the moral and social conservatism of writers such as Russell Kirk, and the optimistic economic individualism of F.A. Hayek and the American Enterprise Institute.

In its struggle to win the minds of American youth, ISI continues to reprint books by conservative authors and distribute them on college campuses. In addition, students can attend ISI summer workshops or lectures sponsored by the group. The spring 1997 ISI lecture series includes 1960s radical-turned-arch-conservative David Horowitz promoting his book, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, and antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly talking about “The Changing Roles of Men and Women.” Students can also read the national magazines ISI publishes and distributes free: Campus: America's Student Newspaper, with an annual print run of 350,000, and The Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion.

At LCC, Hollingsworth read the conservative thinkers cited in ISI's Campus, which is written by students and promotes a conservative educational agenda. For example, Campus alerts readers that the multicultural movement “engenders idiocy” and pursues “intolerable diversity.” To put these newfound ideas into action, Hollingsworth became an ISI student representative and got involved in LCC’s student government.

Campus alerts readers that the multicultural movement “engenders idiocy” and pursues “intolerable diversity.”

First as a senator and later as student-body president, he began to implement his fiscal accountability plan to shrink programs funded by mandatory student fees. Cut student fees. Defund the Oregon Student PIRG (OSPIRG). Eliminate the Child Care Co-op. Reduce student government. Get LCC out of USSA. Hollingsworth succeeded with only the last item. He met with stiff resistance from student interest groups and college administrators. By the end, he says his car was vandalized and he received threatening phone calls. Rather than face a recall election, he resigned his presidency and soon left LCC. He continued to pursue a teaching certificate at three other Oregon colleges and served as a campus representative for ISI at two of them.

ISI isn’t the only well-funded conservative organization on college campuses, says Texas journalist and researcher Scott Henson, who studied and wrote about college conservatives for the Texas Observer. “ISI peaked in the early 1960s, but the Madison Center has been incredibly effective,” he said.

Until recently, the Madison Center for Educational Affairs was active on campuses through CN, but in 1995, the Madison Center transformed CN into the Collegiate Network, Inc., which then contracted with ISI to administer the program. The Madison Center was founded in 1978 (as the Institute of Educational Affairs) by Irving Kristol, the influential neoconservative editor and writer, and William Simon, who was President Nixon’s treasury secretary. Simon, in his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, laid out his plan to reinvigorate American liberty. First, he said, business interests must form foundations that would “funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty.” Next, business “must cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economics, government, politics and history are hostile to capitalism.” Finally, he recommended that business defund any media that “serves as megaphones for anticapitalist opinion,” and fund media that agree with his aims.

To this end, Simon became president of the John M. Olin Foundation, which spends $200,000 per year on conservative college publications, according to the Washington Monthly. Olin also funds the National Association of Scholars, an organization of conservative professors. Olin is one of five conservative foundations that, Henson says, “are the centerpiece funding entities for the right-wing intellectual movement in this country.” The four other major contributors, says Henson, are the J.M. Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation and Sarah Scaife Foundation. Giant corporations and powerful old family fortunes fuel these giant funding entities.

Within ISI, CN carries on the Simon tradition. With an annual budget of $300,000, CN gives money and training to student editors and writers at its 50-plus conservative publications. Assistance comes in the form of operating grants, scholarships to CN journalistic training conferences, story ideas and editorial resources, year-long internships at national publications and guidance from experienced professionals. Network magazines have a combined annual distribution of more than two million copies.

Students backed by CN have leapfrogged into positions of prominence in media, politics and government, according to a 1996 article in the Washington Monthly. For example, Matthew Rees joined the Weekly Standard from the Wesleyan Review; David Mastio, who wrote columns for the University of Iowa’s Campus Review, now writes editorials and edits the op-ed pages at USA Today. Michigan Review’s Johnathan J. Miller is now vice president

Foundation money for left-leaning magazines constitutes 10 percent of the funding right-wing magazines receive.

of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Lynne Munson of the Northwestern Review was Lynne Cheney’s top staffer at the American Enterprise Institute before she joined Bob Dole’s campaign. Mark Thiessen of the Vassar Spectator became Jesse Helms’s spokesman on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. No one in this group is more than 30 years old.

Nothing like this exists on the left. In fact, foundation money for left-leaning magazines like The Nation, The Progressive or In These Times constitutes 10 percent of the funding right-wing magazines receive. No magazine on the left has its operating costs paid for, as does the ultra-right American Spectator.

As large foundations fund students who move into government, media and academia, public funding for education, research and public works is shrinking. Frank Chodorov’s plan to turn a nation of collectivists into a nation of individualists seems to be working. With its deep pockets, the right can afford to cultivate promising young women and men, raise them to positions of influence and continue to support them as they make their mark on public policy.

Hollingsworth hasn’t received the kind of help many students receive from CN and other conservative campus groups, and he’ll probably find a teaching position without needing any help from ISI. What ISI has done is provide him with an ideology and a link to a rich political network. Hollingsworth spent three days a week student teaching a blended class of first and second graders in the fall of 1996, increasing to five days a week in the winter. His wife, Lisa, says he is mellowing with age, and she thinks that teaching will move him more to the political center. At the time he agreed, softly. But now he says, “I’ll be a conservative until they plant me in the ground.”

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