Curious readers of Harvard's student publications might wonder how the College's two conservative newspapers, The Salient and Peninsula, continue to operate with only one or two paid ads per issue. Many other publications, including Perspective, rely almost exclusively on advertising to cover their costs. In fact, although the former two papers often tout the unqualified virtue of free enterprise, both have managed to balance their books for years only with the aid of massive subsidies from conservative foundations. While Peninsula has stopped receiving funds this year, The Salient continues to enjoy the cash. Inquiry into the funding sources of these and other right-wing college papers reveals both a hidden hypocrisy and the inadequacy of corresponding liberal funding networks.

Gaps between the right's rhetoric and reality are hardly new. Whether it's one-way "free trade" to pry open Third World markets or the recent domestic efforts to introduce market discipline to the poor while strengthening corporate welfare, the language of free enterprise has seldom accurately expressed conservative intention. In an ironic reversal of fortune, the progressive campus press survives by wooing advertisers, while the adamant defenders of Adam Smith's magic are propped up by a concealed, but very tangible, hand.

Both The Salient and Peninsula are members of the Collegiate Network, an association of over 70 right-wing college newspapers from Dartmouth to Stanford which provides its members with substantial subsidies, start-up grants, coordination, and training. The Network also provides editorial input, at least according to former editor-in-chief of The Stanford Review, Lisa Covan: "They help us form our opinions and plan conferences." The Network, administered until last year by the Madison Center for Educational Affairs (MCEA), recently merged into the larger Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a group known for its dedication to purging "the pervasive forces of multiculturalism."

Corporate donations and foundation grants enable the MCEA to subsidize its members generously. The Madison Center was founded in 1978 by former Treasury Secretary William Simons and prominent neo-conservative Irving Kristol. By 1991, its budget exceeded $1 million, $633,900 of which was provided by conservative foundations, most prominently the Olin, Coors, Richardson, Bradley, and Scaife Foundations, according to the Cambridge-based Center for Campus Organizing (CCO). The rest came from the Center's own endowment, individual contributions, and corporate donors like Bechtel, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and Mobil. The money was apparently well-spent: William Buckley's National Review boasts that "without [MCEA] there would not be a conservative-student-newspaper movement to speak of."

Collegiate Network grants, along with others administered by ISI, have created staggering funding inequities that renders the model of a free marketplace of ideas questionable when these ideas hardly need to appeal to any readership for sustenance. After all, as Jeff Newbern of MIT's progressive Thistle points out, "speech is free only to the extent that you can afford to speak." Right-wing foundations have ensured that college conservatives can afford to speak. According to Newsweek, ISI gives conservative groups at Yale nearly twice as much money as the college gives to all its student groups combined. The Network's most notorious member, The Dartmouth Review, has alone received $295,000 from the Olin Foundation, most of it in the last three years, reports The New York Times.

Until recently, both of Harvard's conservative papers depended on Collegiate Network largesse to pay their bills--journalistic welfare checks enabling them to print attacks on AFDC. A tactical decision by the Network to continue funding only one newspaper per campus has ended Peninsula's subsidies this year, although the magazine's senior Council member Brian Malone confirms that his publication received funds in past years. Some speculate that Peninsula's especially erratic printing schedule this year is the direct result of financial troubles stemming from the budget change. The Salient, however, continues to receive cash from the Network. Former Salient Executive Editor Ross Frisbie estimates that the MCEA annually provided $4,000 of the paper's $10,000 operating budget. In addition to the annual bequests, the Salient received a $3,000 one-time grant for its move to a biweekly format in 1993; the paper was given a new Pentium computer in exchange for operating the Network's World Wide Web site; and Salient staffers attend free Washington seminars hosted by the MCEA. Douglas Gordon, The Salient's current president, confirms that about 40 percent of his publication's funds come from the Collegiate Network.

The sources of the funding inequities aren't mysterious: as apologists for the prevailing power relations, conservative thinkers will forever benefit from a steady dollar stream. Progressives, by the same token, usually end up on the short end of the funding stick because they consistently oppose moneyed interests. Examples aren't difficult to find. According to Beth Schulman of In These Times, between 1990 and 1993, leftist foundations invested $269,000 in four progressive publications: The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones, and In These Times. During the same period, the right invested ten times as much, pumping $2.7 million into The New Criterion, National Interest, Public Interest, and American Spectator. Similarly, the annual budget of any one of the big conservative think tanks--the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, or the Hoover Institution--exceeds the budgets of all left-of-center think-tanks combined.

The left will never be able to harness the resources of Exxon or receive grants from a foundation funded by a brewing Jfortune, and for good reason. It is therefore easy to lapse into a resigned acceptance of the left's inherent funding disadvantages. The wide disparity, however, also reflects strategic miscalculations and distorted priorities in the allocation of progressive resources. "Left-wing foundations could be a lot more methodical in funding priorities," notes the CCO's Jeremy Smith. "They tend to focus on a flavor-of-the-month, like alternative campus press, for a year, leaving no real change to develop. The right commits to funding over a number of years." Left-leaning funding sources like the Rockefeller Foundation exist, but rarely use their limited resources to foster lasting institutions like a network of campus papers. Nan Aron, executive director of the Alliance for Justice, attributes the rapid spread of the conservative college press to the "ambitious" funding of "strategic" right-wing foundations with "very well-defined" goals, a vision he hasn't observed on the left.

Instead of sporadic and inconsistent stopgap funding, progressives must reorient resources to long-term, strategically important projects, emphasizes Chip Berlet, chief analyst at the Cambridge-based Political Research Associates. "It is like being below a dam that is leaking. Your house is covered in a foot of water. You start mopping faster and faster and then someone comes and says, `You know, if we fix the dam we are not going to be knee-deep in water.' And you say, `Don't bother me, I'm mopping.'"

Progressives must not fail to observe the connection between inequities and the ideas which perpetuate them. Although a Salient without ads seems harmless enough, it is important understand why corporate-funded foundations back this newspaper and its cousins so aggressively. With an especially impressionable readership, college publications can affect the formation of student opinion; the influx of outside cash testifies to these newspapers' importance. With the recent wave of mergers and acquisitions that have left most mass media outlets in the hands of a few massive conglomerates, the ownership of communicated thought is fast becoming exclusively corporate. Ideas, although not always the handmaidens of material interests, are broadcast to the extent that those with resources want them to be. The corporate community, with an unambiguous stake in the status quo, controls most of these resources.