...The number of College Republicans, for instance, has almost tripled, from 400 or so campus chapters six years ago, to 1,148 today, with 120,000-plus members (compared with the College Democrats’ 900 or so chapters and 100,000 members). And College Republicans are thriving even on elite campuses. “We’ve doubled in size over the last few years, to more than 400 students,” reports Evan Baehr, the square-jawed future pol heading the Princeton chapter. The number of College Republicans at Penn has also rocketed upward, says chapter president Stephanie Steward, from 25 or so members a couple of years ago to 700 members today. Same story at Harvard. These young Republican activists, trudging into battleground states this fall in get-out-the vote efforts, helped George W. Bush win.

Other conservative organizations, ranging from gun clubs (Harvard’s has more than 100 students blasting away) to impudent newspapers and magazines, are budding at schools everywhere—even at Berkeley, crucible of the sixties’ student Left. And right-of-center speakers invited by these clubs are drawing large and approving crowds. “At many schools, those speeches have become the biggest events of the semester,” Time reports. One such talk at Duke by conservative author and former Comedy Central host Ben Stein, notes Time, attracted “a bigger crowd than the one that had come to hear Maya Angelou two months earlier.”...