The Cornell Review - History

History

The unanticipated success of the Dartmouth Review at Dartmouth College inspired conservative students at other institutions to found similar newspapers. The Institute for Educational Affairs, founded in 1978 to assist conservative academics, created The Collegiate Network in 1984 to offer these groups technical and financial assistance.

Jim Keller, a government major, founded The Cornell Review during his senior year in the spring of 1984. The paper drew immediate and critical attention for its discordant rhetoric and "shock journalism." Ann Coulter, then an undergraduate in the history department of the College of Arts and Sciences, served as its editor during the fall of 1984.

During the 1980s the Review targeted affirmative action, gay rights, communist sympathizers, abortion, and anti-apartheid activists, while defending the Reagan Administration, the Greek system, and the university administration (against striking workers). It notably criticized university-sponsored ethnicity-oriented residential communities, known as "program houses," as segregationist.

In 1986, leftists voiced their opposition to the paper by seeking out and shredding nearly every copy of one issue at a multitude of locations on campus during the early morning hours after delivery.

The Review was embroiled in several controversies in the 1990s. In 1991, an editor was accused of inappropriately directing student funds to support the Review, although the allegation was dropped. In 1993 its funding was threatened again after it printed a cartoon critical of President Bill Clinton's move to permit gays in the U.S. military which was widely called homophobic.

In 1997, the Review printed an anonymous editorial lampooning the Oakland, California school district's move to mainstream so-called Ebonics. Entitled "So U Be Wantin' to Take Dis Class," it presented a mock catalogue of courses taught in African-American Vernacular English, but in highly stereotyped language, for instance "Da white man be evil an he tryin' to keep da brotherman down. We's got Sharpton and Farrakhan so who da...man now, white boy." A student protest followed in which a number of copies of the Review were burned. The editors defended the editorial as satire and criticized the burning as suppression of free speech.

The Review historically prints pieces that bring great debate and controversy. In the autumn of 2002, Cornell Review Online published a column by Elliott Reed whose Good Vibrations piece exposed a coverup of vibrators to be sold at the campus health center. Reed discovered an email to a feminist listserv which claimed the health center had agreed to sell vibrators and solicited comments from female students. The university claimed the email "jumped the gun," as no decision had been made at that time. The Review was awarded a "Campus Outrage" nod from the conservative organization, Accuracy in Academia, for the piece.

In December of 2008, The Cornell Review started its blog, the Cornell Insider.