When I spoke at Michigan State, I had been preceded by columnist Julianne Malveaux, the official Martin Luther King Day speaker there, who received $15,000 from student funds, some of which were supplied by the black student association. As in the case of Davis, Malveaux's views are antithetical to King's. She is a crudely racial Marxist who once asserted that there were "200 million white racists in America," and on another occasion expressed her wish that Clarence Thomas would have a heart attack. Her speech was called "Economic Justice: The Struggle Continues," and included attacks on Ward Connerly, Laura Bush, the idea of a colorblind society and of King as its prophet.

I had been preceded at Duke by Aaron McGruder, a black cartoonist who had gained fame through his strip "Boondocks" and notoriety for attacking America after the World Trade Center was bombed. McGruder was also the university's official Martin Luther King Day speaker. In his speech, McGruder noted that 90 percent of the American people supported the war and said, "I would like to believe the 10 percent left over is black." He then told the students, "your vote means nothing; you can protest if you want, they'll throw you in jail." Davis, Malveaux and Magruder reflected the extremist sentiments of the black student groups on campus without whose imprimatur no Martin Luther King Day speaker could be selected.

In the academic world, the situation at Vanderbilt -- where $130,000 is provided to left-wing groups, and roughly $0 to conservatives -- is completely normal, with the exception of a handful of small conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale and Bob Jones University. At the University of Wisconsin, the Multicultural Students Association attacked the reparations ad I placed in the Badger-Herald last spring by attacking the paper as "a racist propaganda machine" -- an absolutely unfounded smear -- and attempting to shut the paper down. The MSA was rewarded for its bad behavior the following fall with a grant of $1 million to fund its radical activities. On the same campus, the Students for Objectivism receive a mere $500 in student program funds. At Duke University, in the wake of my reparations ad and the demonstrations that attended it, president Nan Keohane announced a grant of $100,000 in additional funds for student groups. When I spoke at Duke, which was a day after my visit to Vanderbilt, $50,000 of Keohane's grant had been disbursed -- $500 to the Duke Conservative Union and $49,500 to left-wing groups. Because university funds were unavailable, my Wake Up America hosts had to raise the money from outside contributions, not an easy task for students. They managed to secure funding from three individuals and from two conservative organizations -- Young America's Foundation, which underwrites the lion's share of my tours, and the Leadership Institute. The money they raised allowed them to bring me to campus, house me and provide about one-fifth the honorarium I would have received if I were a left-wing ideologue like Julianne Malveaux. If I were Malveaux, or Cornel West, or Gloria Steinem, in other words, I could have collected more than $200,000 this spring for attacking America and posing as a champion of economic justice to college students. There is probably not a single left-wing activist working the campus circuit who is not making a six-figure income.

A frustrating but typical trait of college conservatives is that they don't -- as a rule -- complain about the inequities that are routinely inflicted on them. Because they do not make trouble for abusive and illiberal campus administrators, nothing is done to correct these problems.

Funding inequities are actually only a small part of the injustices that conservative students suffer and that seem like normalcy to them. They also adjust, for example, to the rampant political bias in their expensive curricula, which is the result of a faculty hiring process that bars conservatives and limits the education of all students to a relentlessly one-sided view of the world they live in. Obtaining a faculty sponsor for Wake Up America was thus even more difficult than getting the vice chancellor to approve its formation.

The founder of Wake Up America, Eberhart, scoured the campus for a professor who would sponsor his club. He put letters of request in professors' mailboxes. He approached them directly. In the end, out of approximately 1,000 faculty members at Vanderbilt, he was able to come up with only one who would sponsor a group whose intention was to bring conservative speakers to a college campus. Vanderbilt is not only an old and traditional institution, but it is hosted by a state with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, and a citizenry whose majority voted Republican in the last presidential election -- against a favorite son, Al Gore. The successful purge of conservatives from the faculty of Vanderbilt is thus a sobering commentary on the politically debased condition of the American university, which has fallen victim to an academic McCarthyism more insidious than the academic witch hunts of the past because it is incomparably more effective.

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