How Campus Reform, a Tiny Conservative News Outlet, Pioneered the Attack on Colleges

Around the height of the pro-Palestinian campus protests last year, a conservative journalist sent an email to the federal government complaining about Princeton University.

“Jewish students have felt increasingly unwelcome and unsafe at Princeton,” the journalist, Zachary Marschall, wrote. He cited a series of news reports about pro-Palestinian activism on campus, including a student group demanding “the full dismantling of the Zionist apartheid state.” He wanted a full investigation.

Dr. Marschall was not a student himself. In fact, he had never stepped foot on the Princeton campus. Nevertheless, the complaint resulted in a federal investigation.

Dr. Marschall, who is Jewish, may be the most prolific filer of antisemitism civil rights complaints to the federal government. He says he has filed 33 against colleges around the country, leading to 16 investigations.

The Trump administration has made fighting antisemitism a central plank in its education agenda and vowed to punish institutions that it says have allowed antisemitism to proliferate. Many of Dr. Marschall’s targets have landed on a list of 60 schools that officials have said they are investigating. (Princeton did not comment on the complaint or the investigation.)

Dr. Marschall considers the government’s attention to his complaints another victory for the conservative newspaper he edits, Campus Reform, and its longtime mission to expose what he calls leftist bias and abuse on college campuses around the country.

His group, though small, was an early architect of the internet-era conservative attack on higher education. In recent years, the group’s alarmed view of American college campuses has moved from the fringes into the mainstream.

Its articles have been picked up by outlets like Fox News and Newsmax. It has provided grist for a movement of like-minded, right-leaning activists. Similar groups have formed, mimicking its tactics, and in recent years its concerns that colleges have left-leaning biases have gained some traction in more moderate circles, including among some who argue free speech has been stifled on campuses.

“Higher education news went from a niche topic to a national news topic,” said Dr. Marschall, who has been editor in chief since 2022. “There’s a trend away from isolated incidents to: How does this fit into a national conversation?”

Campus Reform was started in 2009 as a social media site for conservatives by the Leadership Institute, a training ground for conservative students founded by the activist Morton Blackwell. The institute trains conservative leaders and helps students start newspapers on their campuses, among other activities. The site transitioned in 2012 to cover news.

It has since published thousands of articles about liberal professors and students on American college campuses. The articles are often written by freelance college students, with headlines like “‘Queer polyamorous neurodivergent woman’ teaches Ithaca College workshop on ‘Ethical Non-Monogamy.’”

Last year, the Leadership Institute hired Riley Gaines, who tied for fifth place in a college swimming championship with a transgender woman and became a cause on the right among people who argue transgender athletes should not compete in women’s sports. In 2023, the group spent about $34 million on its programs, including about $1.5 million on Campus Reform.

Now, the “reform” long sought by the newspaper is taking hold. The Trump administration is trying to stamp out diversity and equity programming, through threat of federal force. To avoid the government’s wrath, many campuses have renamed or eliminated diversity offices, tightened protest rules and taken a harder line against student activists.

Campus Reform’s critics argue its bleak view of colleges is an invention stitched together with anecdotes, often out of context, sometimes broadcast by mainstream media. They say it is an unfair and inaccurate view of life on campuses and note that its tactics, which often single out and name individuals, can lead people to become targets of harassment and abuse.

But the view that campuses are dominated by liberal faculty and students is not a new idea.

The modern conservative movement began after William F. Buckley Jr. chronicled perceived left-leaning biases at Yale in 1951, where he attended as an undergraduate. He published a book called “God and Man at Yale,” which accused the school of being anti-Christian and preaching “collectivism.”

But Campus Reform updated the strategy for the internet era, and others followed. A similar website, The College Fix, started around the same time. A much larger group, Turning Point USA, started a watch list of professors it deemed purveyors of “leftist propaganda” and launched Charlie Kirk to conservative stardom.

“When we started,” said John J. Miller, the founder of The College Fix, “we didn’t feel like we had a ton of competition.”

Campus Reform “mainstreamed the strategy” of using anecdote to craft a narrative of higher education, said Isaac Kamola, a Trinity College political science professor who has studied the group.

“In the last few years, especially after the Black Lives Matter protests, that’s been taken up by lots of organizations,” he added.

Now, books like “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which described a new generation of college students quick to take offense and turn to censorship, have become best sellers. Professors on many campuses have formed groups to decry liberal groupthink.

After the Hamas attack on Israel upended campus politics in 2023, Republican lawmakers and others, including powerful donors, embraced the issue of college campuses as liberal hotbeds. Several high-profile college presidents were toppled after facing intense pressure from Republicans.

Dr. Marschall got involved, too. He says colleges have been hypocritical and are less attuned to antisemitism than discrimination against other minority groups. He said he began using Title VI as a mechanism to protect Jewish students on campus, filing complaints based on news reports.

His effort has highlighted that anyone can lodge complaints that lead to a civil rights investigation, a process the Trump administration is now using in its attacks on schools. The strategy’s success has also been something of a shock, even to Dr. Marschall.

“I was never expecting any of them to be open or investigated,” he said. “This is as big a surprise to me as it is to everyone else.”

Campus Reform is an “anti-intellectual hammer” that has struck fear in faculty members, said Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor who has been the subject of many Campus Reform articles. Dr. Stanley, who recently left Yale and started at the University of Toronto, said any professor who becomes the target of the group receives a barrage of angry and abusive emails, phone calls and physical mail, chilling their speech.

Dr. Kamola also said he viewed the site more as a “surveillance apparatus” watching professors than a news site.

In 2016, Dr. Stanley found himself at the center of a conservative media firestorm for the first time, including a Campus Reform article. He had used profanity on social media to condemn a philosophy professor who said being gay was a disability, leading to a backlash.

Dr. Stanley said it was a devastating experience. He couldn’t grade papers, spent three weeks in bed and felt abandoned by colleagues. His office phone rang off the hook, and someone sent pornography to his home depicting someone being raped.

Being the target of groups like Campus Reform “has been the greatest threat to freedom of expression for the last decade,” Dr. Stanley said. “People are terrified about appearing on their site.”

The American Association of University Professors, an academic freedom group, surveyed more than 300 people who were the subject of Campus Reform articles written in 2020, and heard back from over 200. More than 40 percent said they had received threats of physical violence.

Dr. Marschall, an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky with a doctorate in cultural studies, said universities are petri dishes for broader cultural fissures, which is why his group and others focuses on them.

Dr. Stanley says that Dr. Marschall’s current complaints are an abuse of Title VI, which was meant to curb harassment, not speech. “When Black students complain about racism, they’re being snowflakes,” said Dr. Stanley, who is Jewish. “When some Jewish students complain about other Jewish students being pro-Palestinian, suddenly it warrants a Title VI investigation.”

When Dr. Stanley announced he was leaving Yale and moving to Canada, he cited the ugliness of the American political environment and the Trump administration’s attack on higher education.

His departure was noted in a Campus Reform article, under the headline, “Yale professor compares Trump to Nazis, flees to Canada.”