Campus Reform carefully tracks how well it creates headaches in academe.
On a dry-erase board in its offices here, the online publication tallies numbers related to its mission of exposing liberal “bias and abuse” at American colleges. In mid-August, the board showed that so far this year it had published more than 530 articles, seven of which had been featured by the Drudge Report, an online conservative news hub that drives big audiences. Its reporters had been interviewed 27 times on Fox News, 43 times elsewhere on television.
Most important, in its view, it had scored 15 “victories” — a term it applies to any situation in which a college changes a policy, fires someone, or otherwise responds to concerns raised by the reporting on its site.
In recent years, Campus Reform and a similar publication, The College Fix, have emerged as major forces in academe’s ideological battles. Each routinely puts college administrators and faculty members on the defensive with articles alleging liberal bias or indoctrination. Each has demonstrated a knack for generating outrage by producing stories that spread virally through social media. Conservative radio and cable-TV programs and right-leaning websites amplify their reach by picking up their stories. Seeing themselves as friendly competitors devoted to the same cause, each of the two publications often cites the other’s work.
Although many professors and college administrators dismiss Campus Reform and The College Fix as biased and sensationalistic, there’s no question that their ability to reach wide audiences can place colleges under intense public pressure.
Late last month, for example, Campus Reform thrust Washington State University into the middle of a national controversy by reporting that some instructors there had barred students from using terms such as “illegal alien.” The article was cited by conservative blogs and shared on social media more than 30,000 times, according to a meter on Campus Reform’s website. (Campus Reform says it has more than 42,000 followers on Facebook and more than 55,000 on Twitter.) Washington State subsequently announced plans to ask faculty members to alter their course policies to ensure students’ free-speech rights.
The College Fix sparks similar uproars, as was the case last spring when it reported that the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor had canceled a scheduled showing of American Sniper in response to complaints that the movie perpetuated negative stereotypes of Muslims.
Both organizations rely heavily on the reporting of college journalists, whom they pay about $50 per story and offer training for news-media careers. Their editorial models help them maintain large, low-cost labor pools — a useful adaptation to the reality that neither publication sells nearly enough online advertising to sustain itself.
With their national networks of campus-based correspondents, the two publications “perform a really essential function,” says George Leef, director of research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and a frequent contributor to the right-leaning National Review’s higher-education blog, Phi Beta Cons. “It is like having scouts out in the army so you can find out what is really going on in the field.”
Spinning Right
Campus Reform and The College Fix make no effort to hide their ideological slant. That’s apparent in their use of headlines and photos that portray colleges as beset by leftist tyranny and liberal excess. Recent headlines from Campus Reform include “Atheist organization goes after college football chaplains” and “UCLA student: criticism of my tampon column was sexist.” A recent College Fix headline said, “UNC’s ‘Literature of 9/11’ course sympathizes with terrorists, paints U.S. as imperialistic.”
Morton C. Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute, the conservative advocacy group that operates Campus Reform, calls most of higher education “a left-wing indoctrination center.” Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, holds a similarly dim view of academe: “There are too many professors who openly and vehemently despise America.”
While almost any journalistic publication fields complaints from those it covers, some academics’ objections to Campus Reform and College Fix stories go well beyond allegations of minor factual inaccuracies or biased wording, crossing into assertions that the articles were completely off base.
Michael Heaney, an assistant professor of organizational studies and political science at Michigan, last month denounced as “patently false” a College Fix article about one of his courses, under the headline “‘Activism’ class at University of Michigan teaches capitalism should be ‘overthrown.’” He said the site had based the accusation not on anything he taught in class, but on a textbook passage he had not assigned.
Ms. Kabbany, the publication’s editor, said that Mr. Heaney had refused a reporter’s requests to discuss the class, and that the text in question featured contributions from “a parade of leftist scholars.”
Both Ms. Kabbany and Sterling Beard, editor in chief of Campus Reform, say they insist that their student reporters be fair and offer those they cover an opportunity to comment. Rather than attack the veracity of reporting about themselves, many college instructors and administrators own up to errors in judgment, often leading to the institutional responses that Campus Reform tallies as triumphs.
Campus Reform, which says it had 25 such cases last year, refused to offer details on most of its recent successes, describing many colleges’ responses as having been made quietly. Among those Mr. Beard would discuss: In July, after his publication reported on the existence of a “bias-free language guide” on the University of New Hampshire’s website, Mark W. Huddleston, the university’s president, disavowed the guide as unrepresentative of his institution’s commitment to free speech and ordered it removed.
Henry F. (Hank) Reichman, chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, says he regards Campus Reform and The College Fix as “totally within their rights to pursue whatever criticism they may have of higher education or even individual professors.” His chief concern, he says, is whether colleges respond in a manner that protects faculty members’ academic freedom and due-process rights.
Big Ambitions
Mr. Blackwell, a longtime Republican activist and a former executive director of the College Republican National Committee, established the Leadership Institute in 1979 to train young conservatives for careers in politics, government, and the media. He set up Campus Reform as an online social network in 2009 and turned it into a news site in 2011, based on his belief that online publishing could expand the reach of young conservative writers whose work had been read mainly in campus-based newspapers and blogs. Campus Reform says its online offerings attracted about 9.3 million page views last year.
The Leadership Institute, which reports having annual revenue of nearly $15 million, produces Campus Reform out of its headquarters here, where Mr. Beard and three other full-time employees work with a revolving staff of about five interns. A network of about 50 correspondents, many of whom cover both their colleges and nearby campuses, accounts for about three-fifths of the articles the site publishes.
Campus Reform also draws upon the Leadership Institute’s network of nearly 1,600 conservative groups on college campuses for news tips and potential material. To expose a faculty member attempting to engage in what the group believes is liberal indoctrination, Mr. Beard says, “all it takes these days is one kid with a smartphone who turns on their recording app.”
Twice a year, Campus Reform brings 20 to 30 of its correspondents to town for journalistic training, which includes coaching for television in the Leadership Institute’s well-equipped studio. A “wall of fame” near its full-timers’ cubicles holds framed shots of reporters and editors being interviewed on television.
“The Leadership Institute and Campus Reform have been able to take a lot of talent, groom it, and put it out there,” says Mr. Beard, a 2012 graduate of Dartmouth College and alumnus of the conservative Dartmouth Review, who joined Campus Reform as news editor in 2013. The site specializes in “a small genre of journalism, but it is a very exciting one to be in,” he says.
The College Fix’s publisher, the Student Free Press Association, was established in 2010 to groom young conservatives for careers in the news media by placing college students in internships with right-leaning publications. The association began publishing The College Fix the following year, at about the same time that Campus Reform became a news site.
“We really are about getting students to get bit by the journalism bug,” Ms. Kabbany says.
With an annual budget that it reports at about $400,000, the Student Free Press Association is a much smaller operation than the Leadership Institute. The College Fix operates solely online, without a brick-and-mortar office. It has two full-time editors and one part-time editor who work with roughly 50 correspondents on college campuses.
John J. Miller, director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College and president of the Student Free Press Association, says he established The College Fix partly as a means of working with young journalists at the large proportion of colleges that lack conservative or libertarian alternatives to official student newspapers.
“For a young writer, if you want to focus on political correctness on campus, it is the gift that just keeps on giving,” Mr. Miller says. “Every time the school year starts, I am anxious to get going with great stories again.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
