In response to the continued, prevalent liberal bias in higher education, Campus Reform has launched an end-of-year fundraiser to better equip conservative students to fight back on their college campuses.
The Campus Reform 2012 Challenge will raise $5,000 each for eight schools — Cornell University, University of Colorado, The Ohio State University, Penn State University, University of California Los Angeles, University of Minnesota Duluth, University of South Carolina and University of Texas at Austin — that the organization identified as some of the most liberal in the country, for a total of $40,000.
“We just saw a need that if we had more resources to put toward these students that are already doing great work on their campuses, they could even more,” said Bryan Bernys, vice president of the Campus Leadership Program for the Leadership Institute (LI).
Campus Reform is a project of LI, a conservative non-profit that offers political trainings across the country. Campus Reform invests money into training and empowering young conservatives to take back their college campuses by helping them create conservative organizations, fund speakers and hold other events. This new challenge is just an extension of Campus Reform’s current work, Bernys said.
The particular schools in this year’s challenge were selected by Campus Reform’s Regional Field Coordinators, who identified universities that were most in need of help and where extra resources could make a significant difference, Bernys said. Despite the $5,000 goal for each university, donations so far haven’t topped $500 for any one institution.
In an email announcing the challenge, Leadership Institute founder and President Morton Blackwell described the effort as something he’s “never done before” and said he wanted to give LI’s supporters the opportunity to “determine where my staff and I focus our attention next year by donating to train and organize conservative students on that campus.”
Because each campus has different needs, Bernys said the funds will be used differently at each school, but all the money will be used to help conservative students “promote and defend conservative values” on their campuses. The trainings would begin during the spring 2013 semester.
Bernys said the intended result of the Campus Reform 2012 Challenge is to “make each one of these campuses more truly diverse and a place where conservative values are talked about and welcome on campus.”
The challenge started in early December and will continue through the end of the year. Once the challenge is over, Bernys and the rest of the staff will evaluate its success and determine whether or not to conduct it annually.
