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.” 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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.