The Daily Signal - #533: Help Is on the Way for Conservative College Students

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

On today's episode of The Daily Signal Podcast, we talk with Charlie Copeland, president and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISI was founded in the 1950s by William F. Buckley Jr. and is an organization focused on providing college students with an educational background on conservative thought. Copeland weighs in on the state of high education today and what trends he is seeing across university campuses. Also on today's episode: • We offer you a preview of The Heritage Foundation's latest podcast, Millennial Myths. It's a podcast for millennials by millennials. From myths about socialism to the Electoral College, Millennial Myths combines “on the street” interviews with personal stories and expert analysis. Check it out: @millennialmyths. • We also read your letters to the editor. You can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. • And we share a good news story about a Missouri community that went above and beyond to support a young family during a difficult season. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at dailysignal.com/podcasts. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, August 26th. I'm Robert Blewey. And I'm Virginia Allen. Today we are talking with Charlie Copeland, president and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We also share a clip from our new podcast called Millennial Myths. Plus, we read your letters to the editor and have a good news story about a Missouri community

that went above and beyond to support a young family during a difficult season. Stay tuned for today's show. Coming up next. We are joined on the Daily Signal podcast. today by Charlie Copeland, president and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. ISI is an organization that's focused on providing college students with an educational background on conservative thought. Charlie, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Well, Charlie, as you and I know,

students across America are heading back to campus or in many cases probably already there, and ISI's mission is to inspire them to discover, embrace, and advance the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous. So tell us as those students are now back in their classes and experiencing all the joys of a campus life. How do you go about accomplishing that on so many of these bastions of liberal thought in America? We've been around since 1953, and so we've got a pretty good experience. And the first place that we start is with our faculty associates.

We have a network of faculty, conservative faculty, and libertarian faculty on campuses across the country. Interestingly enough, they do exist. They're woefully outnumbered, but they do exist. And many of them, we've been offering graduate student fellowships since the early 60s. So about 600 faculty on campuses across the country, actually are ISI graduate student fellows.

And then there's another, oh, almost 2,400 faculty that are on the campus that we've engaged with in one way or another, and we communicate regularly to them with content ideas, with curriculum ideas, and other information about conservative ideas and where the educational space is in conservative circles. And in return to that, they provide us access to some of their students, and we are really looking for bright, deep thinking, intellectually curious, conservative and libertarian college students who really, they understand that there's something else out there than what they're being said by 90% of the faculty, and they're looking for it,

and they find us through our faculty associates. And then we also have, you know, a few staff that we have regional directors, and they're usually just a year or two out of college, and they carry a caseload of college campuses, and they go and they meet with students and help those students develop ISI societies. They help those students. the students organize and host lectures and debate. And we'll also work with students to set up student journalism programs and student newspapers. And we've got on almost 60 campuses, conservative focused, if you will, coming from the conservative side, investigative journalism newspapers that do stories on campus.

So it's really very robust and it's across the board. And as I said, we have these faculty members that help us identify students. We have our staff, our regional directors that help identify students. And then we have other students that will say, hey, I know this young student, male or woman or whatever, and they'd love to get involved in ISI, and we dial them in. And lastly, we do a lot of social media outreach, and any parent or grandparent or aunt or uncle or student who may be listening to the podcast, if they go to join.isi.org, join.isi.org. and they can sign up and get an intellectual starter kit,

which includes a book from Russell Kirk and some other material, as well as Modern Age, which is an intellectual journal we've got, and some regular updates on conservative thoughts, both from economics, policy, philosophy, and politics. That's great. Well, you've now served as ISI's president since 2016 after a career in politics and business. Can you share with our listeners about the founding of ISI

and why your predecessors saw the need for an organization that would advance critical thinking among college students? We go back a long way. We were founded in 1953, and our first president was William F. Buckley Jr. So we've got a lot of big shoes to fill over those many, many years. And he started, ISI, or became the first president, after writing his book, God and Man at Yale, in which Bill Buckley pointed out, again, that's in 1953, that the campus culture was being increasingly dominated by a progressive, secular, left-leaning faculty elite. And so he started this, and we've been working away at it ever since.

and, you know, flash forward to today where, as I mentioned, we've got almost 3,000 faculty associates that we work with. We've got 100 societies on campus. We run almost 200 lectures and debates every year. And what we're looking for is, again, that really bright, deep thinking, intellectually curious, conservative libertarian thinker, who's going to go on when they graduate and be a leader somewhere. They're going to be a leader in their community, a leader in their state, a leader in, in the country and that maybe it's in business or maybe it's in politics, maybe it's in the law, the founders of the Federalist Society that have done such a great job identifying and

promoting conservative justices. We're all ISI alumni. Two of our two members of the Supreme Court, Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch, both participated in ISI programming when they were on college campus. And I could go on and on with the number of folks that you and I would all know out there that went through ISI programming, and And we want to identify those kids because we firmly believe that one person with courage and intellect makes a majority. And we want to identify those students so that they have – we know they have the courage, and we know that they're bright, and we want to make sure they understand where these root and foundational principles come from and why they are still appropriate to today's culture, to today's society, to today's world. a matter of fact, they're more important today than ever.

And these are the tickets that will continue to make Americans and, frankly, the rest of the world prosper and grow. Charlie, thanks so much for sharing that impact that you're having. You know, one of the things that I think is fascinating is the involvement you have on such a deep level on so many college campuses across this country. As you talk to students or maybe some faculty in certain cases, what issues do you hear coming up over and over again today? that our listeners should be aware of? There are a handful of issues, and they revolve around, as you might imagine, things like free speech. They revolve around intellectual diversity. They revolve around feeling that you are able to espouse and debate the ideas that you believe are correct.

And maybe you find out that they're not, but they're afraid. to necessarily even raise those points. And it's gone beyond just sort of this, well, I don't want somebody to, I don't want to look like I'm the only one in the class to, in many cases, a fear of property and physical safety. And so we last year identified what we thought were five of the most compelling activities of suppression of free speech. And that's the suppression of free speech came not only from fellow

students, which were probably the least frequent suppressive activities, but from the faculty or the administrations themselves. And that's what I think is much newer today over the last 20 years than you might have seen previously on college campus, is the administration and the faculty themselves really driving a dogma and a perception down on the students that if you don't parrot back to us what we've said to you, we will affect your grades, will affect what courses you can get into, will affect what housing you might even get into, because the administrations and the faculty have significant leverage over students. It is a power structure. And our students are the

ones that are on the receiving end of that, and then sometimes you wind up with the antifas of the world and groups like that that are physically assaulting students. But it really is the universities themselves that have created bureaucracies that are trying to stamp out, you know, conservative or libertarian or free thought. One of the key debates among young people and across America right now is gun control. When you speak with students on this issue, what are some of their concerns? The average student that we work with is not all that worried about gun control. writ large, other than they believe in the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.

Obviously, they're as affected as the rest of us are by these instances of mass shootings that get so much publicity. And as we all know, and again, our students are really bright, insightful, you know, young people, and they know it is not a sound-by issue. Whenever, you know, whenever anybody says, oh, well, I'm just for common-sense gun reform, well, what does that even mean? And it's when they start saying, well, we should do this or that, that all of a sudden common sense disappears. And our students recognize that.

So we've had students even over the summer write in some of our student journals, you know, editorials or that are research based across the board, talking. about, you know, is this a mental health issue or is this a broader, you know, denigration of our culture issue? Is this a, should we have red laws, should we not? You know, what is the impact of these shootings versus the impact of just being on a college campus? Every year, on every college campus, there are acts of violence that do not get the coverage that a single grotesque act does like Dayton or El Paso. And both Dayton and El Paso, as we all know, were conducted by individuals that had very different worldviews, although they both believed

in the green agenda. But that's not what was driving them. It was an anger, as far as I can tell, about American culture. And our students, I think, very much understand that. And to a certain extent, because they are in an area of culture on the college campus that is not the, quote-unquote, preferred culture by the administration and the faculty. And so they understand the harshness that now occurs and how social media creates a pile-on mentality. And I think that they're very thoughtful and they're very upset, but they don't believe that you're just going to solve this by snapping your fingers and say, well, if we had red tag laws and, you know, identified folks with mental health issues, because many, many gun violence, much gun violence is not committed by people with mental health issues, but they are people that are disconnected from society. and our students see that disconnection as directly as anybody else because they're outnumbered on campus so significantly. Charlie, it's so refreshing to hear you talk about the students having a principled point of view and value for the founding principles of this country and also the critical thinking skills to hopefully decipher what they hear about and read about. And, you know, we're already here at the beginning of the academic year and hearing stories about the political correctness on college campuses we just had on the Daily Signal podcast, Penny Nance, talking about her and her own son's experience at Virginia Tech, for instance.

What advice do you have for parents who might be looking to ISI or to you personally for, you know, advice on some of the things that they're hearing about on their children's college campus? campuses and how maybe the values that are reflected from those administrators stand in such stark contrast with those of their own family. What do you have to say to them? First, I would say to them, have their son or daughter go to join.isi.org and make sure that they're tied into an intellectual community of bright, deep thinking kids that are national in scope. And also involved in that community are faculty associates across the country. And thirdly, involved in that community is our alumni base, which goes back decades. And so we've got alumni in almost every community around the country.

But so that would be number one, join.ISI.org. But the next thing I would certainly do is you reach out to every campus, and we have – our faculty associates are on 37 percent of college campuses. and most of those are on, you know, the elite schools, the large state schools, as well as some of the smaller liberal arts colleges. And so there are conservative faculty members that are there and reach out to us and get the name of who that faculty member is and go talk to them. In addition to that, one of the questions I would ask that faculty member is, who are the other faculty members that may not be conservative on this campus, but who value viewpoint diversity and are good. teachers because there are good teachers on the left who recognize that neither no ideology or no set of beliefs has all the answers to all the questions that face society.

If we had those answers, we would have solved them by now. And so who are the good professors that will challenge you and make you think, even if those professors come from the left? Because there's value in hearing and debating that type of viewpoint. And the last piece is, you know, identify other students who are not, you know, there's these radical, dogmatic, left-leaning students who aren't really there to learn, but they're there to threaten and cajole. And you can do well on almost every college campus across this country.

But when you are a conservative or a libertarian and you want to try to investigate those, intellectual backgrounds, you have to do more work, and you have to be very focused on what you do and avoid the useless courses that really junk up most college curriculum at this point in time. The other thing is you need to have a sense of humor. It is so easy to be outraged at some of the really just childish things that other students and faculty and honestly, the administration will do. And if you let it eat you up and let it get you angry, you're playing their game. You know, Roger Scruton is going to be speaking at our annual dinner.

Well, he's leaving a video message for us. He's ill. But he talks about finding beauty in the world. And I think that is something that conservatives do much better than liberals is look and identify true beauty. not just sort of this passing fads. And I think that if we're happy warriors who identify the right professors and the right students, you will be successful.

I love that expression. Happy warriors. Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned social media and how ISI is adapting to the way students get information today. What are some ways conservatives can more effectively communicate with Gen Z and with other young people? You know, everybody hangs out in Twitter.

Twitter, and Twitter is a little bit of an outrage factory, and it's designed to be that way. You can't have deep intellectual discourse in 280 characters or less. And so I would – and it's fun to participate there and be there and that kind of stuff. But if you really want true discussion and discourse, social media is not the place to do that, and it was not designed. I mean, you look at some of these folks that founded social media companies, and they clearly are not very good at interpersonal relationships, which is probably why they created computer programs to handle their interpersonal relationships for them.

And so if you really want to have discourse, you've got to go do that in person. You've got to go to a election. You've got to go to a debate. You have to have a discussion group or a reading group. And so I would use social media largely to try to create those events and those opportunities to sit down with one, to five, 20 other people and talk about the deep ideas and how to apply them to today's

community and culture. Charlie, I'm so glad to hear you say that we often hear that same type of advice from our president at Heritage, Kay Coles, James, and what she does in terms of showing up. It's good advice. Yes, it certainly is. You know, one of the other ways that you're having success at ISI is through conservative journalism and teaching people the principles and the practices that go into creating some of those successful dialogues and discourse through campus publications.

Tell us more about that journalism program and what kinds of work that students are doing through ISI support. The student journalism program, we've been doing this for over 20 years, and we've got 57, 58 papers, and they're investigative journalist-type papers. And if the student wants to start one of those papers, again, they can go to our website, and there's an area on that website where they can indicate that. And we have a staff member here that actually ran a student newspaper when he was in college a couple of years ago, and it's a very bright and smart young man,

and we've got a lot of great things going on there. And so we have a couple of classes that we will offer throughout the year to help them get started. A couple of conferences that we invite student journalists to so that they can get an understanding of how do I do this? How do I run a student newspaper? And I use sort of air quotes on that because only a handful of them actually still print hard copies.

They're largely web-based at this point in time. But it's one thing to put content up on the web. It's another thing. How do you go and get the stories? And what kinds of stories should they be looking for? And then we help to promote those to other outlets so that in some cases they can be picked up by national media and others and, you know, create maybe even create the point of the sphere of a specific issue that might have occurred on a campus, whether it's about free speech or whether it's about viewpoint diversity or whether it's about, you know, inappropriate behavior by a faculty member or what have you. And so we really want to encourage those papers long. And then we offer every year 10 summer internships, paid internships,

that we place our student journalists at major media outlets, Rale News & Observer, National Review, and we offer 10 full-year paid when you graduate fellowships at similar national or regional news outlets. And we've got folks at places like USA Today for crying out loud. And in the Wall Street Journal. And so we're very cognizant of trying to place these really bright kids who are great writers at these outlets because they do a great job.

And in the last year, 70% of our fellows who wanted to stay in journalism were able to get jobs. within the journalism area. And some of our alumni, Mark Teeson, columnist Washington Post, Jonathan Carl, ABC News, Laura Ingram, Fox, Katrina Trinco, adds the Daily Signal. Well, thank you for mentioning The Daily Signal. Can you tell us just one more time about how students can get involved with ISI? The best way for a student to get involved in ISI,

because it's easy, is join.isi.org. and you just put in your email where you're going to school or if you're at school what grade you're in and we will send you an intellectual starter kit and we will get you onto our regular weekly email message, which usually includes three or four different sort of five to seven minute reads on conservative intellectual thought and history, and we'll also be able to tie you into whether there's a local ISI society there or if we have a faculty associate on that campus, as well as perhaps get you tied into debates and lectures, and we offer about five or six regional conferences every year.

We have a summer honors conference, as well as we often have a freedom of virtue conference. And so that would be the number one way. Number two way is to look for an ISI society on your campus, as well as whether or not you think there's, a conservative professor on your campus, that professor is likely an ISI faculty associate and can get you tied in as well. But the best way is join.isI.org. Charlie, that's great. Congratulations again on the success you're having at ISI, and thanks for

spending the time with the daily signal to tell us about it. Oh, well, thank you very much and thank you guys for what you do. Well, we look forward to keeping in touch and following your work. You bet. Thanks so much. Tired of high taxes, fewer health care choices, and bigger government, become a part of the Heritage Foundation. We're fighting the rising tide of homegrown socialism while developing conservative solutions that make families more free and more prosperous. Find out more at heritage.org. Heritage Foundation intern Samantha has spent the summer working on our digital team here at the Heritage Foundation. Samantha came to us shortly after the internship began and said that she wanted to produce a podcast for millennials,

millennials. That's right. And that is exactly what she has done. Over the summer, Samantha wrote and produced the millennial myths podcast. In six episodes, Samantha tackles some of the most common myths around the hot button issues young people are talking about. From the gender wage gap to socialism, Samantha breaks down each topic by conducting a man on the street interview to gauge the public's opinion and then dives into the topic with a Heritage Foundation expert. Enjoy this quick teaser of the show and be sure to check out all six episodes of Millennial Miss wherever you get your podcast. Is a $15 minimum wage feasible?

What would the impact be on the economy? The consumer? I asked people around Washington, D.C., if they believe we should have a $15 minimum wage, whether or not it would impact the economy and the consumer and much more. Do you support a $15 minimum wage? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

I do because a lot of people that have those jobs, they need their money for their families and all that. So I definitely agree with that. I do as well. I believe that $15 should be a livable wage. Of course, you know, people would have to change state by state because, you know, cost of living is different. But I support something reasonable like that. Would a $15 minimum wage help or hurt the economy? I believe that there's going to be growing pains with it, of course.

But at the end of the day, you put more monies into the pockets of the money. families, you put more money into the pocket of consumers and everybody wins. Just give it like two years maybe. I'm not really sure. I mean, I think it would kind of help because it would just get more money flowing and more people would be able to afford to live. I think it would help the economy. I think too. We have one in France. Honestly, it might help the economy too because that means that you give people more money to put in their pockets so they can support other businesses and the circulation money goes like that. So yeah, I think it helps. What's the danger of imposing a 15 dollar minimum wage. I mean, I can tell you what people say that danger is, but honestly, I think

it's more of a concern. Like, it's people are freaked out about it, but they're just using it to stop the minimum wage from rising when the benefits would outweigh the risk. Because then if a business is slow gone, then they're not going to have enough money to keep as many people employ, so it's definitely... Possibly, but I still think it'd be worth a shot. People say that it would cause the costs of living to rise with the minimum wage. But I think, as I said, I think the benefits outweigh the risks of that. I feel like it starts with the taxes, to be honest with you. Of course, you know you got fewer people at the top that want to make that amount of money, but at the end of the day, if you spread it or if you stop doing it for profitable purposes,

everybody's going to win. Would a $15 minimum wage have an impact on the consumer? On the consumer? What you did? Yeah, I think so, because then when the prices of goods go up then, so I think so, yeah. Yes. I would say it would have an impact on the consumer and that they would have more money to consume with. Did you know you can now listen to all of our events through SoundCloud or just by visiting our events page on heritage.org? You now have access to hundreds of events and compelling discussions on policy.

shoes from your car, on the train, or the comfort of your own home. Visit heritage.org slash events for more information or search for the Heritage Foundation on SoundCloud. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday, we feature our favorites on this show and in our Morning Bell email newsletter. Virginia, who's up first? In response to Daniel Davis's piece, two California moms sound alarm about lewd sex ed coming to schools, Tom writes, wholesome, family-oriented education.

consisting of science, literature, history, civics, etc., no longer is available in the public schools. Due to the increasing demand, the cost of private schools will continue to increase. Most cannot afford to pay taxes in addition to private school tuition. Parents must demand a state credit equal to the allocation that would have been provided to the public school. That credit should be usable for tuition, books, etc. any accredited institution, public or private. And in response to Hans von Spakovsky's article, this sheriff was sued for cooperating with ICE,

now he's vindicated, Donna Leist writes, Thank you, Sheriff, for putting the safety of citizens ahead of the lawless policies of elected officials. I'm tired of being called names because I believe that illegal aliens should not have rights in the United States. The media twist facts and use children to further their agenda.

It is outrageous that they fought the citizenship question on the census. We have every right to know who is in our country. I am saddened for citizens who live in areas where sanctuary policies have been inflicted upon them. Your letter could be featured on next week's show. Send an email to letters at dailysignal.com or leave a voicemail message at 202-608-6205. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to Scotus 101. a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. We enjoy bringing you a good news story every Monday to start your week off right.

Virginia, over to you. Thank you, Rob. You know, it is hard to believe that summer is almost over and that kids are on their way back to school, but here we are. And the first day of school, you know, it's always such a big deal. And for one little boy in Missouri, it turned into a whole community event. Carmine Madeline is five years old and has autism. His mom and dad worked very hard to prepare their son to begin kindergarten with other kids his age. But Carmine's dad, Andy, almost missed this special day.

Andy Madeline is a police officer and was recently diagnosed with cancer. Just a few weeks ago, he underwent major surgery to remove the cancer and has slowly been recovering. Knowing his dad was still in the hospital, 20 local police officers arrived at Carmarine. house to walk the young boy down the street to school on his first day of kindergarten. We decided we needed to pay it back to him and be here for him and his family to walk Carmine to school on his first day. But the day was made much sweeter when doctors gave Carmine's dad permission to leave the hospital for just a few hours in a wheelchair so he could surprise his son on this momentous day. Daddy!

Hi, buddy. Hi, buddy. How you doing? Good. All the kids and parents heading back to school this week and next, we hope that you have an excellent school year and that you are also encouraged by the Madeline story to support those in your community who might be facing some challenges this fall. Thanks for sharing that story of Virginia, really heartwarming and inspiring as usual. Of course, my kids are back at school today for the first time in second grade and fifth grade. So I look forward to hearing their first day stories later today. Absolutely. That's great. We hope they have a great day. Well, we're going to leave it there for today. The Daily Signal podcast comes to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. You can find it on the Rurcashay Audio Network. All our shows can be found at dailysignal.com slash podcasts. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app.

And be sure to listen every weekday by adding the Daily Signal podcast as part of your Alexa Flash briefing. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review and a five-stom. star rating. It means a lot to us and helps us spread the word to other listeners. Be sure to follow us on Twitter at DailySignal and Facebook.com slash the DailySignal News. Have a great week. The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Rob Bluey and Virginia Allen. Sound design by Lauren Evans and the Leah Ramberside. For more information, visitdailysignal.com.