Contesting the University of the People: Conservative Activism and Identity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1960-1969

This thesis traces the development of conservative activism over the course of the 1960s at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Conservative Carolina students actively constructed a political vocabulary through which opposition to civil rights, student protest, and social change could be expressed without the explicit defense of segregation. They sought to translate old assumptions about race, heirarchy, and belonging into the idiom of Cold War politics and the New South, fighting the university's reputation as a haven for academic liberalism.