Conservative magazine survives years of controversy on left-leaning campus

"Many doubted our commitment to non-partisanship, and some even took turns guessing how soon we would perish. Yet the record speaks for itself," thunders the opening page of the March 2005 edition of The Carrollton Record, Hopkins' self-described alternative publication.

But with headlines like "Socialists of Johns Hopkins" and "Pro-Choice Violence at Hopkins," readers might be forgiven for questioning the Record's impartiality.

An unflattering photograph of Al Gore, last year's Commencement speaker, is captioned, "Seniors get a chance to look a loser in the eye." 

Gore is described in the article as "a red-faced, angry firebrand that [sic] seemed to have adopted the stylings of a cross between Al Sharpton and [Unabomber] Ted Kaczynski."

Junior Jered Ede, currently the Record's layout editor, said, "In a way, it's non-partisan, but we do take a conservative stance." 

Senior Ayan Gupta, the Record's associate editor, insisted that the Record does not have a political orientation. "Columnists from the Green Party are welcome to submit op-eds ... [The Record] has a conservative philosophy, but we try to give fair-minded views," Gupta said.

The Carrollton Record was founded by then-undergraduates Steve Park and Nicholas Naquin and published its first issue in the spring of 2002.

Starting life as the newsletter of the College Republicans, it soon spun off in response to a new Student Activities Commission regulation prohibiting clubs from publishing newspapers over a certain length.

Graduate student Dan Simon, currently the Record's publisher, believes the rule change was a politically motivated attempt to silence the paper.

"I feel at that time there was a strong anti-conservative bias on the [SAC] board," Simon said, adding that he no longer believes this to be a problem.

Nonetheless, the Record has never received money from the SAC.

In fact, its staff is reluctant to discuss their paper's funding. Senior Anthony Paletta, the editor-in-chief, said only that the Record has "private sources of funding ... not to be disclosed."

Similarly, Gupta said, "I can't really talk about that. We have donors, and that's all we've generally told people."

Managing editor sophomore Matthew Czekaj identified the Collegiate Network, an organization dedicated to supporting conservative campus newspapers, as the Record's source of funds.

When the Record first started publishing, its articles dealt mainly with national or global politics, Paletta said, but since he became editor-in-chief the paper has focused mainly on campus issues.

Last year, Gupta wrote an article entitled "Professor Lenin," about outspoken Baltimore socialist and inveterate political candidate Bob Kaufman. Kaufman taught a course on socialism in the Baltimore Free University sponsored by the Hopkins Center for Social Concern.

When pressed, Gupta conceded that Kaufman is not actually a professor. "I don't think they directly pay him but they give him resources and materials," Gupta said.

Kaufman's enraged response to Gupta's article ("I admire the high quality of newsprint on which your anti-intellectual, irresponsible, yellow-journalism attack on Free University instruct-

or Bob Kaufman was printed," Kaufman wrote) appeared in the next issue of the Record, as did a guest column defending Kaufman's right to teach in the Free University.

In the latest issue (December 2005) sophomore Kevin Chang wrote an article criticizing the turnstiles installed in front of the AMRs at the beginning of the school year.

Paletta is similarly critical of recent University efforts to improve the security system on campus, criticizing the recent installation of security cameras as "questionable measures" and complaining that "the AMRs look more like a Gaza checkpoint now."

Other articles published by the Record in the past year have examined implications of the changes to the security shuttle service, the Center for Social Concern's involvement in anti-war activities, and alleged that there was an anti-conservative bias in the political science department.

Simon believes that The Carrollton Record performs a valuable function on a campus that is "generally apathetic to all politics."

The often controversial nature of the topics covered in The Record tends to spark heated arguments, either between readers or angry responses from people who disagree with the points made by the reporters and staff of the Record in their publication.

"The Carrollton Record has done a lot. It's put politics out where people could see it. c9 I think it fosters an exchange of ideas," Simon said.   

Ben Wetmore, the director of student publications at the Leadership Institute, who has worked with Record writers in the past, said, "Jered [Ede] is one of the best students I've ever had, and The Carrollton Record is a very good paper. We work with over 150 papers and theirs is one of the best by far."

The next issue of the often controversial Record will come out "very soon," Paletta said.

Regardless of when the next issue leaves the presses, the Record has a left a legacy of offering a forum for conservative viewpoints amid an often liberal school.