Shepherd, Lauren Lassabe

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.