MANKATO — Take a jaunt through almost any public college campus, pick the brains of the faculty, survey the bulletin boards’ announcements of discussion groups and coffee klatches and sustainable biofueled vegan meetings.

Chances are you’d walk away from it all with the distinct sense the goings-on within the halls of academe drift toward the liberal end of the political spectrum.

For the most part, you’d probably be right. But not everyone on a typical public college campus is a Democrat-voting, card-carrying liberal. And a few right-minded students hope their new publication, The Maverick Underground, can knock down what they say is a myth that all students are liberal.

“This is something we’ve been mulling over for a few years,” says Adam Weigold, managing editor of The Maverick Underground, the first edition of which hit the Minnesota State University student body Jan. 26.

Conservative backlash in what have traditionally been bastions of liberal thought is a bit of a growing trend.

More and more, conservative faculty members at college campuses around the country are voicing opposition to what they see as an overwhelmingly dogmatic environment of liberalism.

Growing divide

During fall semester 2004, a professor at the University of Montana’s law school needed a mediator to be allowed to teach a constitutional law class. In an appeal to one of his rejections, tenured professor Robert Natalson wrote, “The law school apparently views this course as politically sensitive and has kept it in liberal hands for over 20 years.”

Nothing so drastic has happened at MSU, but Weigold and Maverick Underground editor-in-chief James Dye say they’ve both been in classrooms where the liberal bias shown by the professor has been overbearing and made them uncomfortable.

They also say they’ve heard stories from other students who suspect their grades on papers or other assignments were negatively affected by their conservative beliefs.

“There’s really a lack of ideological diversity on campus,” says Dye, who also happens to be a member of the Student Senate.

The Web site Intellectualtakeout.com, funded by conservative think tank Center of the American Experiment, lists statistics showing 72 percent of college professors identifying themselves as “liberal.” The same statistics also show, however, just 18 percent of the public identify themselves at “liberal.” The study was conducted by the nonpartisan group The Forum.

The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles found in its study that of the 55,000 faculty and administrators surveyed, 48 percent identified themselves as either “liberal” or “far left.” Thirty-four percent identified themselves as middle of the road. Just 18 percent identified themselves as conservative or far right.

Marketplace of ideas

Randy Wanke, an MSU alum who now works as communications director for the Center of the American Experiment, visited campus several months ago to promote Intellectualtakeout.com.

He says when he was a college student, he considered himself liberal. But the more time he spent expanding his mind in college, he says, the more conservative he became. He recalls several occasions where professors created an uncomfortable atmosphere by launching into liberal political asides that, in some cases, had little or nothing to do with the subject matter.

“I just think it’s important to allow students to make that progression, let them make up their own minds,” said Wanke, who served as student body president in the early 1990s. “A college campus should be a marketplace of ideas.”

And that’s sort of what The Maverick Underground hopes to provide: ideas.

It doesn’t aim to be a newspaper in the traditional sense. Instead of attempting to cover the news objectively, its goal is to allow anyone with a conservative viewpoint to have an outlet for their opinions. But if the first issue is any indication, the Maverick Underground also intends to take on some school issues.

First issue

Issue 1, Volume 1 contained pieces questioning the wisdom of spending thousands on diversity training and why the city would “legislate personal behavior on private property” with its smoking ban.

There is a mission statement that says, among other things, “We take it as our mission to fully expose those here at Minnesota State University, Mankato that make unethical, corrupt, leftist, decisions that simply take away what should be inherent rights of students.”

There is humor, including a back page with an altered image of Al Gore — one hand is holding a cigarette, the other is down his pants. There is feature urging students to send in their “best drinking picture.” There is a crossword puzzle. Even a Sudoku puzzle.

Fighting words

Also in the first issue was a piece, written by Weigold, questioning why students are being asked to fund a full-time sexual assault coordinator. While the piece’s tone may strike a positive chord with conservatives, clearly not everyone on campus is impressed.

Hateful?

Deirdre Rosenfeld, director of MSU’s Women’s Center, says she gets three or four people in her office each year who want to get in her face because they don’t like the women, or don’t think their fees should fund a women’s center or don’t like the activities the center sponsors.

The Maverick Underground, she says, seems to come from a perspective of ignorance.

“My thoughts about (The Maverick Underground) are complex,” Rosenfeld says. “My initial response is, it’s great for students to have a voice ... But I feel these authors here are doing two things. They want to disapprove of things going on in my department, but it also appears that they don’t really understand what we’re doing here.”

Weigold’s article quotes Student Senate Vice President Michael Bruner, who questioned the part-time sexual assault coordinator’s role in organizing the upcoming presentation of “The Vagina Monologues,” saying the play “just doesn’t cover sexual assault.”

He told Weigold if the women’s center wanted help with that type of activity, that’s the type of position they should have asked for when they came to the Student Senate several years ago asking for money.

But Rosenfeld said that criticism goes against her reading of “The Vagina Monologues” and ignores the notion that proactive measures are part of the job for any sexual assault coordinator.

”What’s clear in this article is that the author and the people quoted clearly don’t understand what sexual assault or sex violence issues are,” she said. “They seem to have a hard time seeing why it’s important to do more than just have a counselor.”

Weigold’s history

Last spring Weigold ran a successful bid to become president of the Student Senate. But a few weeks into his term, he was declared to have not made satisfactory academic progress and was suspended from school. Because he was no longer a student, he had to surrender the presidency.

Weigold disputes the policy that resulted in his suspension and claims the university applied them to him retroactively to get him out of the presidency. The incident earned him the No. 2 spot on the “Top 5 Campus Outrages of 2005” in the ultra-conservative American Spectator Magazine.

From there, Weigold didn’t lay low. A month or so after his departure, two opinion articles highly critical of the university’s handling of his suspension appeared in the Minnesota Daily, the student newspaper of the University of Minnesota. Weigold has never attended the U of M.

And ever since then, Weigold, now a Metro State University student, Dye and a handful of others have been working to publish their first issue of the Maverick Underground.

Underground’s future

The first press run for the newspaper was 5,000 copies and contained no advertising. To fund the newspaper, they’ve sought a series of grants, including one from the conservative group The Leadership Institute. They also took a course from the Leadership Institute’s Campus Leadership Program that showed them the basics of journalism.

As for the newspaper’s future, they’re planning a special Valentine’s Day issue they say will be “explosive,” which is said to feature some investigative reporting on the MSU administration.

“We want to do some hard-hitting stories,” said Dye, “and I hope we’ll keep it hard hitting.”

“By challenging people,” Weigold said, “there can be good that can come of this. We want to keep this as truthful and honest as possible.”