The Phoenix Mission
One of the great pleasures of editing a publication at Wabash is receiving letters from alumni. Wabash alums are a special group — more engaged, more interested, and more passionate about their alma mater and the students who currently reside there than, I am convinced, any group of graduates from any other school.
I recently exchanged emails with one particular alumnus who was frustrated with The Phoenix’s proclamation to be the “voice of,” but inability to clearly define, the conservative movement at Wabash. Since I and a number of other writers are evangelical Christians, he charged, we should call ourselves something more along the lines of “the voice of the conservative movement as seen through evangelical eyes.” To claim to encompass all factions of conservatism, he said, is to put yourself under a “preposterously large roof,” housing contradictory ideologies that do not belong together.
Well, we will not be changing our magazine’s tagline anytime soon, but that alumnus did bring up an important point. The marriage between cultural and fiscal conservatives, not to mention the foreign policy hawks and doves that both now claim the “conservative” mantle, is often one more of convenience than of conviction. It is most likely born of our American two-party system — by an inability of the individual factions to win an election without forming a coalition with the others. The result of this is that in times of power, the collective conservative movement does not know what it stands for — but in times of opposition, it certainly knows what it stands against.
Luckily for us, these are times of opposition for the conservative movement. The members of the Wabash Conservative Union — the student group that publishes The Phoenix — are intellectually diverse and incessantly argumentative, but still united by a common opposition to the push for progressivism seen all across our county, and especially here at Wabash College. I hope that this back-to-school issue of The Phoenix will give you a good sense of our mission and our style. And I hope that after reading it, you will consider joining our cause. Our coalition is large and growing, and we still have plenty of room for you.
For over two years now, the Wabash Conservative Union has united a variety of different conservative views in a common mission, under a common mission statement:
The Phoenix, a student-run publication of the Wabash Conservative Union, seeks to promote intellectual conservatism on the campus of Wabash College through thoughtful debate and civil discourse. Following the best traditions of the conservative movement, The Phoenix will attack ideas, not people, and will do so with both honesty and integrity.
Central to our mission is an aim to focus on ideas and to do so with intelligence and respect. The conservative movement at Wabash has not always followed that model. Throughout much of the 1990s, conservatism at Wabash was tainted by hostility and vitriol. Professors were targeted for their lifestyles, and their families were attacked. One issue of the old conservative publication featured a photo of a professor with his head in crosshairs. Another labeled a professor’s wife “fat and ugly.” The relationship between conservative students and their liberal professors became a paranoid one. That culture began to change in the 2000s, but the alumni who had created that culture did not. It was in large part this disconnect between students and young alumni which led to the founding of the Wabash Conservative Union and The Phoenix.
The Wabash Conservative Union was founded in March of 2007, following a schism with The Wabash Commentary and The Foundation for a Traditional Wabash, Ltd. — the alumni-led fundraising organization which had previously chosen the Commentary’s student leadership. On March 20, following the Foundation’s decision to oust the Commentary’s Editor-in-Chief Brandon Stewart, the majority of the student members of the organization successfully petitioned the Student Senate to recognize their club as independent of the Foundation, changing the club name from The Wabash Commentary to the Wabash Conservative Union. Within a matter of weeks, the newly-independent, student-run group had published the inaugural issue of The Phoenix.
If you want to have an impact on campus through the written word, The Phoenix is the publication for you. In September of 2007, we exposed the poor treatment of the American flag on the College mall and led the charge to install a spotlight so the flag could fly 24 hours a day. The lighting you see on the flag today is the result of our efforts.
In December 2007, we exposed the disturbing history of Malcolm X Institute guest speaker, Ron Karenga, who was once convicted of torturing two women. Our article resulted in a campus-wide discussion on man whose history, up until our exposé, had been strangely unknown to many students at Wabash.
We have closely followed important happenings at Wabash, including the development of the Strategic Plan. In February of 2008, we called attention to the vague and sometimes troubling language in the initial drafts for the plan, influencing the debate on the topic. By the time the first official drafts were released, most of the troubling language was removed.
In the past year, we have had even more of an impact on campus and have remained an important part of the campus discourse. In the fall of 2008, after the tragic, alcohol-related death of an underage Wabash freshman, the College made the decision to close down the Delta Tau Delta fraternity, citing a “culture and practice of ungentlemanly behavior,” and claiming that “a gentleman always follows the law.” The Phoenix responded with its own investigation of the Wabash College administration and found that they themselves had been violating the law — specifically the Jean Clery Act — by not keeping a log of crimes that occur at Wabash, including underage drinking. We exposed how the College’s failure to record crimes at Wabash led to lax security and unnecessary pain.
Not wanting to dwell in the pains of the past, we then turned our focus forward by offering our advice on how the College could move past the troubles of 2008. Our March 2009 issue zeroed in on the Admissions Department, where the recruiting and admitting of new students can have a profound impact on student culture.
Our Wabash Conservative Union events program is another influential means of promoting conservatism at Wabash, and another example of our intellectual diversity. In the past, our speakers have included Iranian expert Kamran Beigi, who advocated a tough policy toward that country and predicted the burgeoning freedom movement we see today; Civil Rights Institute President Ward Connerly, who made his case against affirmative action; National Review writer and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, who lectured on his book, Liberal Fascism; conservative feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, who spoke of gender bias against America’s young men; author Paul Kengor, who lectured on how Ronald Reagan and Catholics won the Cold War; former Virginia GOP Chair and Fox News analyst Kate Obenshain, who gave a feisty talk defending the McCain-Palin ticket just before the 2008 election; and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education speaker Adam Kissel, who led a discussion on student rights following the Wabash administration’s decision to close down Delta Tau Delta last year.
Last semester’s events program was also exciting and relevant. We first hosted nationally syndicated talk radio host Tammy Bruce, who argued that “conservatism empowers gays, blacks, and women.” Her lecture competed against a ‘shOUT club speaker the previous day, who argued that only collective action can bring true equality. The dueling lectures by two openly gay speakers provided for a good campus debate on minority rights.
We then hosted Curt Levey, Executive Director of the Committee for Justice — a Washington-based interest group dedicated to promoting conservative judges on the federal bench. Just before the Sotomayor nomination, Levey predicted that Obama would pick a woman, and probably a Hispanic, to serve on the high court, though he ironically claimed that Sotomayor herself was probably “too controversial.”
Our third and final speaker was Dr. Peter Kreeft, a renowned philosopher and prolific author, who delivered his “Refutation of Moral Relativism,” a philosophic dissection of a set of assumptions that are at the foundation of modern liberalism.
An events program that can include a conservative, feminist, lesbian, the head of a strict constructionist Washington interest group, and a conservative Catholic philosopher indicates a broad coalition indeed!
And we plan to kick off the coming semester’s events program with a timely discussion on identity politics. On October 29, we will host Mr. Joseph C. Phillips, a former Cosby Show actor and conservative political commentator whose book, He Talk Like a White Boy, delves into the complexities of a life experience that represents a small but significant portion of the black community — those who are conservatives. The event is certain to be informative and thought-provoking for the entire campus.
And there are many more very exciting plans in the works. We will keep you updated in the pages of The Phoenix and on our website, www.WabashUnion.org, (or, for those of you who are even more technologically savvy, on our Twitter page, www.twitter.com/WabashUnion).
So enjoy this issue, come to our events, and please look for our call-out meeting and consider joining our cause. These are exciting times to be a conservative, especially here at Wabash. If you are a conservative of any stripe, and you agree with the language of our mission statement, then we will be happy to have you join us. In these times of opposition, our organization is strong, our membership is growing, and our roof is “preposterously large.”
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