What is CAMPUS?

“Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let’s be honest. … You are the best and the brightest. […] But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it ... you are—by your grandfathers’ standards—cowards.” So spoke the great Charlton Heston, then-president of the National Rifle Association, in a February 1999 speech to the Harvard Law School Forum on “Winning the Cultural War.”

A decade prior, the founders of CAMPUS Magazine had already foreseen Heston’s challenge. Around the country, universities were limiting free speech to those inside the party line, promoting trendy models of tolerance and relative truth while showing no tolerance for those who believed in absolutes. Caught in the crosshairs, a group of students heard the deafening silence and realized it was up to them to speak. In 1989, they launched CAMPUS Magazine as the nation’s premier student-run watchdog of the academy.

For fifteen years, CAMPUS has given students a voice of honesty in a sea of political correctness. Throughout the early 1990s, its writers called attention to students’ sharply decreasing levels of cultural literacy, university cover-ups of violent campus crimes, student activity fees misused to subsidize partisan agendas, and the replacement of rigorous intellectual challenges with “sensitivity workshops” that taught students how to feel, instead of how to think.

In the mid-1990s, we investigated the marginalization of the Western tradition for the multiculturalist agenda, the ideologically-motivated theft of college newspapers to suppress free speech, the use of false sexual harassment claims to shut professors out of the academy, and the discriminative policies of “affirmative action.” Reporters also exposed the exclusion of military recruiters from campuses and continued to rail against the cover-up of campus crime.

In 1998, we launched the Campus Outrage Awards, nicknamed the 'Pollys,' to uncover the corruption of American higher education. Each year, these awards have exposed egregious instances of campus injustice and political incorrectness to the public eye, and the vigilance continues.

CAMPUS's recent crusades highlighted the transformation of Title IX anti-discrimination legislation into a form of social engineering, the rise of speech codes to protect the right not to be offended, the suppression of academic freedom by ideologues posing as professors, and the widening disconnect between the impulse for activism and the appreciation of first principles.

Now, we are proud to transition to an exclusively electronic format and to welcome you to CAMPUS Magazine Online. In this digital transformation, we will be providing live content with frequent updates, in hopes to reach a broader, more global audience.

Much has changed in the last 15 years on the national and international scene, but at the university, much has stayed the same. As a gadfly of conscience on modern academe, CMO plays a crucial role. Our writers present the side of the story that academia so often neglects, challenging the reader to believe them—or, at the very least, to engage with them in a constructive, reasoned debate.

Intellectual honesty, as Heston recognized, requires great courage: the courage to be upfront about one’s convictions at the risk of being scorned, humiliated, and proven wrong. The modern academy is full of cushions that help us shy away from this challenge; if you choose cowardice, you will find many ways to practice it.

On the other hand, if you care at all about truth, liberty, and intellectual progress, to defy the stifling forces of silence and conformity is not a choice. It is an inescapable obligation.