Opposition Press on Campus

At more and more campuses across the nation, student radicals have found a powerful new voice for protest: they have gained control of established college newspapers and turned them into journals of dissent.

Dozens of once-moderate college papers are devoting headlines and columns to revolution, black power, drugs and alleged police repression. The University of Wisconsin's Daily Cardinal has irked state legislators by printing four-letter words. A recent--and typical --front page carried off-campus stories about the S.D.S. militancy in Chicago and the failure of the state assembly to resolve welfare problems. In California last month, after San Jose State College's Spartan Daily ran a straightforward front-page news story on the founding of a campus chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, scandalized trustees of the state's 19-campus college system overrode protests by faculty and student leaders and voted to tighten censorship on all student newspapers.

Invective and Results. At State College in Fitchburg, Mass., the school's president canceled an entire issue of the student paper Cycle to prevent the publication of an obscenity-filled article by Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver. The Harvard Crimson, though relatively restrained in its news reporting, has a majority faction of New Leftists who often ram through radical editorials and feature stories. In one recent story, Crimson staffer Richard E. Hyland defended terrorism and wrote: "The only reason I wouldn't blow up the Center for International Affairs is that I might get caught."

Such extreme radicalism has produced a reaction: moderates as well as conservatives, taking issue with the New Left, have begun to seek forums for their views. Feeling that their voices would be muted on the established campus newspapers, they have started new publications that compete with the radicalized papers.

At Harvard, for example, the Crimson now has a moderate rival called the Harvard Independent, a 16-page weekly that published 10,000 copies of its first issue in October. Headed by Morris Abram Jr., son of the president of Brandeis University, the Independent aims to print opposing views of campus issues. The University of Wisconsin's new opposition weekly, the Badger Herald, promised at first to keep its news columns free of advocacy, but swung quickly to the right to reflect the views of its founders, the Young Americans for Freedom. After 93 years of campus monopoly, the Daily Princetonian is being challenged by an offset giveaway called the Princeton Notice, which veers erratically from left to right. M.I.T. now boasts no fewer than five campus papers representing virtually all shades of the student political spectrum.

Most of the new papers lack manpower and money. Relatively few moderate and conservative students seem willing to invest the time necessary to publish a college newspaper; and most college towns provide scarcely enough advertising to support one student paper, let alone two. Moreover, some of the conservative publications are as invective-filled as any radical paper. For example, Ergo, one of M.I.T.'s new publications, recently called the school's antiwar-research demonstrators "neo-Nazis" and "syndicalist swine." Still, the new opposition press is getting results. Says Crimson President James Fallows: "It's unhealthy for an institution to exist as long as we have without competition. Undoubtedly, it's made us check harder into what we cover."

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