Funding the right.

FUNDING THE RIGHT DO CONSERVATIVE scholars betray their principles when they accept federal research grants? The question has set off a bit of a donnybrook in right-wing circles, the tone of which seems to be, "Dear soulmate, you are a hypocrite."

It all started slightly outside the conservative peerage. Late last year, the Cato Institute published a book entitled Destroying Democracy: How Government Funds Partisan Politics, detailing how left-wing organizations hijack federal grant programs to further their own ends. But tacked onto the end of the book si a chapter describing right-wing organizations' use of similar tactics. The authors concluded that the Federal Government should stop funding partisanship on both the Left and the Right.

Shortly thereafter, Martin Morse Wooster, Washington editor of Harper's, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which he pointed out that Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, and a group of scholars from Claremont, California, all accept National Endowment for the Humanities grants to support work that, among other things, argues for the abolition of the NEH. The Washington Times editorial page then weighed in, declaiming: "Now that they constitute the 'in' party, conservatives ought to behave in an exemplary, not simian, fashion. They ought not to ape the very practices they protested for years . . ."

This prompted a response from Russell Kirk, a member of the Times's editorial advisory board, who called the Times's remarks "ignorantly defamatory," arguing that "On that basis, we may expect to encounter in your pages editorials denouncing President Reagan for being paid a salary out of the Treasury . . ." Claremont scholar Harry Jaffa, another member of the Times's editorial advisory board, also wrote in: "I agree that in a more perfect world, the National Endowment for the Humanities would be abolished . . . But in the imperfect world in which we live, the only alternative sometimes is whether our friends or our enemies are going to be helped by the public funds appropriated."

Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus, joined the anti-funders. In a letter to the Times, Phillips expressed great respect for Russell Kirk, but concluded: "He has no more right than do scholars and advocates of the Left to receive discretionary subsidies, [in] the payment of which the IRS allows working Americans no discretion whatsoever."

Though there have been expressions of respect all around, the debate has grown surprisingly acrimonious, in Washington conservative circles especially. The issue will not go away. It is one of the many dilemmas that conservatives, now uncomfortably astride the federal beast, must face.