Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. 280 pp. Paperback $29.95.
In fall 2024 U.S. college and university students returned to fraught campuses. During the previous spring semester, several university administrators had called in police forces to arrest students and disrupt protests against U.S. funding of Israel’s war on Gaza. On other campuses boards of trustees had exercised their power to force the resignation of college presidents depicted as too lenient in their handling of student protests and campus unrest. Many campuses came under the scrutiny of federal investigators, accused of allowing the spreading of antisemitism on campus, thirteen of which were personally instigated by the editor-in-chief of the conservative website Campus Reform.1 While much of the most immediate context for this conflict in higher education is a result of the United States’ support for Israel’s war on Gaza, there is a larger recent trend of dramatic change in American colleges and universities that includes the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action, attacks on gender studies and African American studies programs from Republican legislatures, budget cuts and the privatization of public institutions of higher learning, the growth of contingent non-tenure track teaching positions, and the expanded power of administrators and boards of endowment in relation to faculty, staff, and students.
Anyone perplexed or concerned by this contemporary shift towards conservatism and privatization in higher education would do well to turn to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s Resistance from the Right: Conservatives & the Campus Wars in Modern America (2023). In a concise and brilliant study of three years (1967-1970) in the 1960s, Shepherd traced the emergence of many right-wing tactics and arguments that have proved deeply influential in the years since in shaping both American higher education and the contemporary Republican Party. In her introduction, Shepherd declared that the motivation for her book laid in the fact that liberals and progressives “have generally failed to take the Right’s self-aggrandizing seriously” and that this has been “to the detriment of not just our public colleges and universities but our cultural and political spheres more broadly.”(p. 4) The author’s pivotal intervention in the histories of politics and higher education is an important reassessment of the influence of the far right on these spheres.
Resistance from the Right chronicles the rise of New Right students on college campuses in the late 1960s. Shepherd categorized this brief period as the cohort’s “most combative years” and for a group whose ideas were, as political scientist Corey Robin has argued, “forged in battle,” combat was a generative state.(p. 5)2 The years that Shepherd spotlighted proved pivotal for American higher education— college enrollment doubled in the 1960s, and immediately predated a dramatic shift in the electoral power of U.S. youth, as the the ratification of 1971’s Twenty-Sixth Amendment granted the right to vote to eleven million U.S. citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty.3 Shepherd’s book adds to a growing historiography on American conservatism, within which a subset of scholars have been reframing the 1960s as more than a decade dominated by liberals and hippies.4 Shepherd argued that in these last three years of the 1960s, a cadre of right-wing students, financed and guided by an elder generation of wealthy anti-New Deal conservatives, “participated in an astroturf mobilization against a so-called liberal establishment in higher education.”(p. 3) Shepherd revealed that not only did powerful Republican figures who went on to lead their party, including Newt Gingrich, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Karl Rove, cut their teeth in the campus conservative movement during these years, but that the movement developed effective tactics that activists carried out of higher education and into politics in the decades since the 1960s.
In clear and confident prose that carried readers throughout the book, Shepherd offered three significant interventions in political and educational history. First, Shepherd sharply distinguished the New Right from grassroots movements and emphasized the importance of ultra-wealthy conservative backers to the cohort’s funding and strategy. Second, she argued that through confrontations with liberal students on campus, New Right activists learned that countering the left was their most effective organizing strategy in contrast to putting forward any particular policy goals or ideologies of their own. Finally, Shepherd contended that New Right conservatives discovered that the combination of projecting false popularity while appealing to authority figures to maintain their power could be effective strategies to cement minority rule. In these last two arguments, readers can surely see the emergence of key tactics embraced by the Republican Party today, which, as Shepherd noted, has become synonymous with the far Right.
Through the papers of leading campus groups like Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), interviews with former members of groups like YAF, campus publications, and the records of university administrators, Shepherd explored the emergence on campus of right-wing tactics and ideas that continue to shape political life on and off campuses today. Shepherd’s book reconstructed a conservative movement that contained varied ideologies within larger subgroups that she labeled “traditionalist or libertarian,” but the author clarified that these subgroups found common cause in their minority status on campus, their identification as victims despite holding inherently privileged positions in broader society, and their opposition to communism and civil rights.(p. 28) With expanded support from right-wing non-profits like the American Enterprise Institute, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and the Foundation for Economic Education, conservative students sought to counter a perceived liberal bias among college professors by spreading conservative ideas on campuses through founding new student newspapers, and journals and forming clubs to distribute and discuss national conservative publications. Right-wing publications like the National Review and Human Events aimed to equip conservative students with language to challenge liberal ideas and to project conservative ideology and the impression of a conservative presence across campuses. Additionally, conservative student publications served as forums where students expressed support for increased police presences on campus and documented professors’ supposed biases, as in a YAF publication at the University of Mississippi that included a feature “dedicated to exposing errors (or supposedly errant political claims) made by their professors.”(p. 45)
Shepherd also explored the popularization among right-wing students of the strategy of initiating lawsuits against universities when student protests disrupted classes. Shepherd documented how YAF disseminated instructions manuals guiding conservative students in best practices to sue their universities “for breach of contract” should classes be canceled for reasons related to campus demonstrations. The arguments these cases made were twofold: one was that university administrators had an obligation to provide classes after entering into a contract with students or their parents and any failure to maintain an environment of order was a breach of that contract. The second argument was that professors sometimes canceled classes to encourage students to engage with demonstrations and that this evidenced an inappropriate liberal bias of professors.(p. 178-9) Though few of the lawsuits were successful, Shepherd notes that they “illustrated conservatives’ commitment to using the power of the courts to force their minority will, even at the cost of campus and community safety.”(p. 180)
Shepherd provided her readers with thoughtful and complex discussions of various strands of U.S. conservatism, but readers might wish that she had spent more time describing and defining the liberalism against which these conservatives mobilized. The author stated that “the year 1962 marked the beginning of a critical decline in liberalism from which the United States only momentarily rebounded in 2018,” but does little to define liberalism beyond its inclusion of ideals that conservatives mobilized against.(p. 13) More consideration to the author’s conception of liberalism would have given this timely book even more explanatory power in relation to trends in the contemporary university, since many of the ideological positions and policies that emerge from conservative students in Resistance from the Right can be seen enacted today by university administrators and politicians across the political spectrum. Despite this critique, Resistance from the Right is an impressive intervention in the fields of history of education and political history. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in higher education or Republican politics, either today or in the past.
- Stephanie Saul, Alan Blinder, Anemona Harocollis, and Maureen Farrell, “Penn’s Leadership Resigns Amid Controversies Over Antisemitism,” New York Times, December 9, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/university-of-pennsylvania-president-resigns.html
- Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
- Seth Blumenthal, Children of the Silent Majority: Young Voters and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1968-1980 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018), 1.
- Particularly relevant interventions in this historiography Include Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press 2001), Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2009), Robin, The Reactionary Mind, and Blumenthal, Children of the Silent Majority.
