Media and Campus Footprint: Collegiate Network
The Collegiate Network supported the establishment of conservative newspapers on college campuses through awarding grants and mentoring. Its mission was to call attention through those newspapers to conservative views and to expose the liberal bias implicit in much of campus academic and political thought.
The Collegiate Network of conservative campus newspapers was launched by the Institute for Educational Affairs, itself founded in 1978 by conservatives William E. Simon and Irving Kristol. The IEA’s first official member campus publication was The Dartmouth Review, which published its first edition in June 1980. The newspaper’s capacity to provoke and inflame the established thinking on campus quickly earned it national notoriety and inspired conservatives on other campuses to start their own newspapers along the same model. The Network included at least 70 campuses at its peak.
Alumni of the network include media celebrities Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, and political commentators Rich Lowry (National Review) and Jamie Weinstein (The Daily Caller).
In 1990, the IEA merged with the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, a right-facing public policy organization started in 1988. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute took over the Collegiate Network in 1995. ISI’s mission is to create a broad campus community of conservatives so that no one student should “feel isolated or attacked for questioning progressive orthodoxy and the ever-narrowing range of debate on campus.”
