Wendy Kopp, Princeton Tory

What Wendy Kopp was learning at Princeton, before she was teaching for America.


Going through some old files, I found copies of the Princeton Tory, which was Princeton University’s right-wing undergraduate magazine in the 1980s.

Today it bills itself as “a journal of conservative and moderate political thought.” Back in the day, the Tory ran articles in praise of abstinence and against the campus divestment movement. (“Although Jerry Falwell’s claim that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu is a ‘phony’ is exaggerated, it is true that he has little support within South Africa. The image of Tutu as a prominent figure is a creation of the international community.”) It staged reenactments of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Nothing outlandish or outré; just a slightly fustier version of the campus right of the 1980s.

Most of the staffers were smart. Some, like the magazine’s founders Dan Polisar and Yoram Hazony, were scary: hardcore Zionists, Polisar and Hazony went onto storied if peculiar careers on the Israeli right; Hazony, once a close aide to Netanyahu, wrote a eulogy for Meir Kahane.

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