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

In the fall of 1969, the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom (Yaf) launched the Freedom Offensive campaign. Coming as anti–Vietnam War protests were reaching their peak on college campuses, the campaign was part of a broader effort to build a conservative student movement. But rather than focusing on American policy in Vietnam as an avenue to growing the ranks of conservative student activists, the Freedom Offensive directed its efforts toward opposing the New Left, its tactics, and its perceived influence on universities. The move, as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd suggests in Resistance from the Right, was a concession to the reality that the student Right “had no unifying ideas of their own” (p. 168). The only way forward was to villainize the Left. Shepherd looks to the late 1960s to understand the origins of a modern conservative effort to push “American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right” (p. 3). Using archival collections, secondary studies, and interviews with fifty-six former participants in the campus conservative movement, Shepherd paints a picture of a conservative “movement” engineered by conservative donors and activists—an “astroturf mobilization” that was anything but a grassroots phenomenon (ibid.).