Alumni to the rescue.

THE development officer of a reputable Western university recently took one of the school's deans to meet a wealthy alumnus. In the alum's office, the dean spied a bumper sticker that read: 'Socialists reject history. Fair enough: History rejects Socialism.' Upon leaving, the dean condescendingly remarked that the sticker was annoying, to which the development officer replied: 'You have to learn how to talk to these people. This is the future.'

'These people' are concerned university alumni, and they represent the best hope for influencing colleges and universities back toward sanity. At schools such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Stanford, Wellesley, Duke, Mount Holyoke, and Yale, alumni groups are demanding the de-politicization of higher learning and better stewardship of donations. According to the Wellesley News, in 1994 fewer than 50 per cent of alumnae contributed to Wellesley, for the first time since 1978. Wellesley's alumnae-association director attributes the decrease in part to a demand for accountability. A group of Dartmouth alumni sued the Board of Trustees after rule changes severely limited alumni involvement in decision-making. At South Carolina's Converse College, trustees and alumni forced the president's resignation after a string of multicultural excesses.

Until very recently, the well-documented politicization of colleges and universities went unchecked by alumni. The somnambulance of this core group of university benefactors has allowed college administrators to accede to the political demands of the academic Left without cost. This inattentiveness, however, is ending at a propitious historical moment, a time when universities are facing great financial pressure from reduced government subsidies, resistance to skyrocketing tuition hikes, and the hangover from years of improvident spending. Universities depend to a significant extent on private giving. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, university trustees, alumni, and private donors provide 49 per cent of the total revenue of American colleges and universities, or nearly $3.4 billion in 1994. With the increasing importance of the marginal dollar should come an opportunity for those seeking authentic university reform.

While alumni slept, radicals who entered the academic world in the Sixties slowly achieved positions of power in faculties and administrations. Along with younger disciples, they redesigned traditional curricula, revamped reading lists and course requirements, instituted speech codes, redefined acceptable behavior outside the classroom, and generally subverted the traditional mission of the university. The end of higher learning was no longer to be the cultivation of the mind but rather, as Richard Weaver observed, 'the conditioning [of] the young for political purposes.'

This revolution within the university marched on virtually unnoticed by alumni principally because the college public-relations apparatus held a monopoly on the flow of information. Even when the national press picked up on political correctness (years after the fact), alums were lulled by reassurances that at their alma mater 'nothing had changed.'

But the university stranglehold on information began to loosen when in the early 1980s entrepreneurial students, aided by the introduction of desktop-publishing technology and educational institutes willing to contribute money and expertise, established alternative student newspapers at a number of campuses. Coordinated nationally by the Collegiate Network, these papers gave 75 to 100 schools voices independent of university control. To serve the 2,000 campuses that had no such publication, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) launched in 1990 a nationwide alternative student newspaper, CAMPUS: America's Student Newspaper, and began informational mailings to tens of thousands of targeted alumni donors. As these efforts took hold, alumni started to realize that their alma maters were becoming radicalized laboratories for multicultural experimentation.

The potential for exercising real clout was most recently evidenced by an expose in an ISI-published student journal at Yale, Light and Truth, which broke the story of Yale's refusal to administer as promised $20 million given by alumnus Lee Bass to establish an integrated program in Western civilization. When it became evident to Mr. Bass that he had been kept in the dark while the Yale administration explored ways to divert the money from the agreed-upon program, he asked that Yale refund the $20 million, plus interest. Yale was forced to comply, to the accompaniment of nationwide headlines and the reaction of a donor community infuriated by the sorry treatment of Mr. Bass.

According to reports in both the New York Times and the Boston Globe, much of the opposition to the Bass-funded Western-civilization program was ideological. The Globe reported that 'Some Yale faculty have resisted the emphasis on Western Civilization, favoring a more multicultural curriculum.' The Times stated that 'Liberals had criticized the restrictions placed on the donation, arguing that the money could be better spent on courses with a multicultural perspective.' John Leo noted in U.S. News & World Report that the Bass affair is 'a reminder of how far the modern university . . . will go these days to avoid hurting the feelings of the campus Left.' Meanwhile, Yale's donor community was kept minutely informed by successive mailings of Light and Truth and other updates.

Such shoddy treatment of one of their most prominent confreres led many Yale alumni to ask, in effect, 'If Yale values a left-leaning political agenda over $20 million, how will it treat my $1,000, $10,000, or $100,000 gift?'

After subscribing to Light and Truth, reform-minded alumni like Yale's Robert T. Eskridge are considering novel ways to redirect their philanthropy. Mr. Eskridge wrote: 'We have been shocked when reading the Light and Truth publication, and having recently arranged in our wills to leave most of our estates to Yale and my wife's college, Beaver College, we feel now that we would prefer to support an effort . . . to return the education of future generations to its traditional moorings.' Yale is out of the will, and the Eskridges have established a trust to promote genuine higher learning.

The cost of Yale's behavior is now estimated to be several times the original Bass gift of $20 million. The principled stand of Lee Bass encouraged many others to join a nationwide alumni movement committed to using its financial muscle to restore the traditional foundations of higher education. Already, alumni have organized for collective action at Stanford (Winds of Freedom), Dartmouth (The Ernest Martin Hopkins Institute), Yale (Light and Truth), Wellesley (Women for Freedom), and Princeton (Princeton Alumni Viewpoints).

In countering the agenda of the academic Left, these and other alumni efforts will doubtless be accused of having a conservative agenda of their own. If the impulse toward reform is indeed conservative, it is the noble impulse to conserve the proper ends of an authentically humane education.

From the earliest beginnings of Western culture, the ends of education were those of Plato's Academy: wisdom and virtue. If these ancient ends are to be rescued from the will to power of campus politicians, all of us -- students, faculty, trustees, donors, and alumni -- need to act with a sense of urgency. As William F. Buckley Jr. stated in his landmark book God and Man at Yale, 'If the present generation does not check the university's ideological drive, the next generation most probably will not want to.'