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Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe

Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America

UNC Press (Chapel Hill)

2023



OUR SYNOPSIS: Lauren Lassabe Shepherd illuminates “conservatives’ decades-long war against the academy and the cultural changes that liberal education champions.” She focuses on “how right-wing students of the late 1960s, following the guidance of anti-New Deal elders who sponsored them financially and professionally, participated in an astroturf mobilization against a so-called liberal establishment in higher education during their time on campus.” (2) She argues that these baby boomer students became the so-called “New Right” in the 1970s and “used the skills they learned in college to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right, with the Republican Party as their vehicle.” (3) Overall, Shepherd highlights the conservative backlash against the civil rights movement starting in the late 1960s as it unfolded on American college campuses. Much funding and direction for this backlash came from powerful elite influencers. Most conservative campus activism was reactionary and focused on antagonizing the Left. It was anti-liberal and anti-radical. In the Cold War context, this often included framing any opposition to war as inherently communist. From 1968 onwards, student conservatives increasingly adopted a punitive law-and-order approach.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • To what extent did college students lead the conservative backlash against the Civil Rights Movement?

  • How do histories of campus activism interrelate with American capitalism?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “In the context of national backlash to the New Left and Black Power movements, the collegiate Right internalized how existing power structures functioned, then used this understanding to shape the conservative movement they would carry forth from within the Republican Party.” (5)

  • “Conservatives’ ability to gain power over the academy, implement the Right’s favored restraints, and punish those who threaten their minoritarian capacity is not a recent phenomenon but part of a longer iterative process. The Right has developed, refined, and expanded these strategies through sixty years of practice.” (9)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

  • Ronald Reagan, “Governor Ronald Reagan Speech to the Young Americans for Freedom followed by Press Questions at an Unknown Location,” April 27, 1973, National Archives, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/169488885.

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

  • N/A

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