Institute For Educational Affairs

After a quarter-century of protest rallies on campus, a very unusual thing happened a few weeks ago at UC Berkeley. A student-run newspaper printed an editorial in praise of campus police and their handling of demonstrations and crime. "Thank you for not protesting your perpetual mistreatment," editors of the California Review declared to the pleasantly surprised police force. "You deserve better!" The monthly paper was making its debut as a conservative voice at a school usually considered a center of liberal thought.

After a quarter-century of protest rallies on campus, a very unusual thing happened a few weeks ago at UC Berkeley. A student-run newspaper printed an editorial in praise of campus police and their handling of demonstrations and crime. "Thank you for not protesting your perpetual mistreatment," editors of the California Review declared to the pleasantly surprised police force. "You deserve better!" The monthly paper was making its debut as a conservative voice at a school usually considered a center of liberal thought.

Michael S. Joyce, who as president of the Bradley Foundation played a central role in the rise of the conservative political agenda during the 1990s, died of liver disease Feb. 24 at a healthcare facility in Wisconsin. He was 63.

After reading David Kupferschmid's article, "Alternative Papers Turn Conservative" (Page 1, Dec. 27), my only feeling was sadness. The editors and writers of these conservative tabloids may be a "minority" on college campuses (and I hope they remain so), but what disturbs me most is that their ideology is also that of the man in the Oval Office: big business, militarism and elitism. The wave of conservatism that is snatching the minds of many collegiate Americans is a dangerous thing, especially the almost obsessive desire to make money once out of school.

The Reagan Administration, which has cut billions of dollars from its financial support of charities since 1981, is proposing strict new limits on politically related activities by nonprofit organizations. The Internal Revenue Service wants to apply the regulations retroactively to Jan. 1, 1977, when Gerald R. Ford was President.

In recent years, a concerted assault has been waged by neoconservative intellectuals--including William J. Bennett (as President Reagan's secretary of education), Allan Bloom, Accuracy in Academia, the National Assn. of Scholars, and New Criterion magazine--against those current professors in the humanities and social sciences whose political attitudes were formed in the protest movements of the '60s. "Tenured Radicals" by Roger Kimball, managing editor of New Criterion, repeats the standard neocon refrain that academic leftists--Marxists, professors of women's, ethnic and popular culture studies--are guilty of politicizing education to the exclusion of "the ideals of objectivity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge."