There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes at The Review: navigating the national nonprofit and NGO space, conferences, fundraising, grant writing, managing people, web development, editing, connecting with orgs at other campuses, dinner with Peter Thiel, late-night calls to our First Amendment lawyer. It includes everything you might imagine in the first year of founding and growing an organization like ours at a campus like this, which is more than a full-time volunteer job for one person.
I was told not to start The Review. Nearly everyone from the first meeting the night of Oct. 14, 2024 soon became scarce. I’ve been insulted, condescended to, sent hate mail, borne the brunt of the social exposure and spent my own money in what might be an impossible battle at a campus of this size and uniformity. But the results spoke for themselves: 30,000 YouTube views, 10,000 page views, 1,000 social media followers, 24,000 impressions, 800 subscribers, more than twice the typical grant size of a first-year organization. That progress was only possible with the generosity of donors who recognized the value of this project.
In September 2024, a month after completing a second degree in philosophy, a semester of physics, and The Greek Workshop, I spent the day reading up on the rules of heraldry. I sat on my bed in downtown Berkeley and made The California Review coat of arms. To me it meant something. Years prior I had set out with the goal of getting an education. I relentlessly pursued that mother of all disciplines, but when I accepted a full scholarship to Berkeley, what I found was something very different. The Review represents the antidote to everything that stood between me and this thing I sought. My impulse in its founding, then, was to build a counter-institution in defense of something I value in order to make sure that my experience is not repeated for anyone else.
There are practical reasons these networks of NGOs and foundations exist: political influence, talent acquisition, tax benefits. We have those. But there is an ethico-political reason too that tracks with a long history of societies such as ours in the American academy. It’s one of ideas. We bring our own identity to this tradition from our often-reluctant home at UC Berkeley.
The biggest threats are succession and ideological drift and UC Berkeley faces challenges with both. Of the 46,000 students, about 60% report English as a first language (2020). Of the population of 70,000, 6% identify as conservative (2018) and out of 1,200 student organizations, about 0.4% could be considered conservative or libertarian. The university actively discriminates against this minority in its institutional policies and practices academically, administratively, and financially. It is also a hostile and unwelcoming social environment that adversely affects this minority’s moral convictions, personal lives, academic goals and economic mobility. Many national donors in this space avoid Berkeley and other land-grant universities because of their difficulties. With your help, I hope to continue to set an example for what is possible here. Without it, I am certain that UC Berkeley will erase both The California Review and any memory of its existence.
If you are interested in donating to The Review, use the form below or reach out for copies of our outreach materials at outreach@californiareview.org
The California Review 1868 is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation | EIN: 39-3442203