Later on Tuesday, I drove a couple hours south through southern Illinois and rural northeast Missouri. On my journey, I passed over the Mississippi River and the Missouri River. Pretty neat. I had traveled all the way from the East coast and felt like I was literally crossing the frontier. What journey it has been. That evening, I visited with 3 guys who are trying to insure that the ideas and past successes of ISI and the CN are still alive and will continue to succeed at the University of Missouri (or more commonly known as “Mizzou.”)
One guy was Brian (forget his last name) who graduated from Mizzou about two years ago and was the Editor-in-Chief of Equitas, the CN publication. It really hasn’t published at all in the past year or two, but Brian still has plenty of ideas to insure Equitas has better days ahead of it. The other guy is Shannon Maruzik, who is the leader of the ISI Group, literally called, “Mizzou ISI”. This group really hasn’t done anything “eventful” for the past year, since its last leader, Jill Grounds, graduated. (I had been out here in January 2005 and met Jill and about 10 others from the group then). But, Shannon is keeping the idea of the group alive as he enters his last year of school. The third guy that was there was Brett Powell, who had randomly emailed me about a week before my visit to rant about how he was displeased that ISI had endorsed (actually, published) Rick Santorum’s book. Brett is a “Randian” (follower of Ayn Rand’s ideas) and a hardcore libertarian. He once worked for the Leadership Institute and remains and ISI member as he completes his MBA here at Mizzou.
We all got together to “conspire” about how to keep ISI alive while the old horses of the campus movement are moving on. They’ve identified some potential new leadership and we came up with a variety of ideas. Our conversation was constantly moving from ideas to how to re-organize this at Mizzou to literally, ideas themselves. It was a lot of fun. Brian was “taking notes” (literally) and formulating concrete ideas. Now you know why this guy was a serious leader here and why Equitas was so successful while he was leading it.
At one point when our conversation had gone off on a tangent, I redirected it back by saying, “Where were we?” Brian looked down at his notes, “Francisco said that … in 1951, William F. Buckley said that ‘the universities will not be reformed until alumni get involved.’”. “Exactly,” I reiterated. We talked about how Brian could possibly form some kind of conservative alumni group and work with current students to make the public (and Mizzou alumni) more aware of what’s happening on campus. Perhaps the purse strings of conservative (and rationale) donors would be influenced if they only knew how Leftist many of these university’s programs had gotten. And the conservative idea machine keeps going… even after we campus conservative leaders leave campus we know how important the battle for the culture is on college campuses. If only we could fulfill Buckley’s dream.