Abstract
Seven years ago, I was asked to write an article on the development of conservative student groups in American universities. The growth of conservative student activism was becoming apparent, but the resources for understanding these young conservatives were limited. At the time, the only literature I had to draw upon was a smattering of newspaper and magazine articles, the information provided on the websites of national conservative student organizations and the foundations that funded them, and an exceptional study authored by Pam Chamberlain at Political Research Associates. With the publication of their book, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood have performed a significant scholarly service by studying the role of higher education in the political and social development of conservative youth. Future scholars will be far less lost than I was.
In contrast to the assertions of conservative pundits like David Horowitz who claim that higher education is a center for liberal proselytization and indoctrination, Binder and Wood’s findings show that the experience and environment of higher education is essential to the political and intellectual formation of conservative students. The authors state, “Political actors, we argue are made, not born, as colleges nurture and enhance particular forms of student conservatism” (p. 9). Colleges help to forge the kind of conservatism that students embrace as well as the modes of political engagement that they adopt. But it is important to emphasize here that Binder and Wood’s study yields much less information about why the students who acted as their subjects were conservative to begin with. This is a book about the shaping of conservative youth in American colleges, not about how or why youths become conservative in the first place. Binder and Wood note this distinction and, in so doing, gesture to the research that remains to be conducted.
Binder and Wood draw their subjects from two universities in very different settings and with very different cultures of political action. One, they refer to as “Western Flagship,” the campus of a public university. The other, “Eastern Elite University,” is a private university. One of the major findings of the authors is that conservative students at the two universities engage in very different styles of conservative action. At Western Flagship, conservative students are more confrontational. They organize public events that aim to be provocative and theatrical. They enjoy agitating liberal students, with events like the Affirmative Action Bake Sale at which white students are charged a higher price than students from minority backgrounds. At Eastern Elite, the conservative students pride themselves on the fact that they engage their liberal counterparts through discussion and debate. The interviewees at Eastern Elite emphasize that their style of political activism is consistent with their university’s intellectual culture and privilege persuasion through discussion over inciting outrage as a means of converting their fellow students to conservatism. The authors refer to this approach as “civilized discourse.”
Anyone who has studied or taught at an American university knows that there are exceptions to these rules and the study of such exceptions is pursued in the authors’ secondary focus on what they call the “submerged” styles of conservative political action. At each university, there are conservative students who diverge from or contest the prevailing styles of political action of their fellow conservative students. When students at Western Flagship advocate campaigning for conservative ideas in the fashion of the mainstream establishment of the Republican Party, they are regarded as betraying the spirit of true conservatism in favor of taking their queues from the GOP. Campaigning is also a subordinate form of action at Eastern Elite, but it is understood as complementing the tactic of civilized discourse and contributing to the overall cause of conservative students at Eastern Elite. But Eastern Elite has a second submerged style in the form of what the authors label as “highbrow provocation.” Unlike their Western Flagship counterparts, Eastern Elite’s provocateurs turn to penning articles and editorials in school newspapers.
The subsequent chapter is titled and poses the question, “Who Are Conservative Students?” Most relevant to the overall argument of the book is that the interviewees attribute their pre-college commitment to conservatism to a range of variables. Similarly, the interviews show that the interviewees had been exposed to a range of styles of political action before entering college. All this is to reinforce the validity of the authors’ claims about the centrality of the college experience in fostering forms of conservative political style and engagement. Chapter three surveys the terrain of right-wing political organizations, which finance and offer guidance to conservative student organizations. Identifying the different services provided by youth-oriented conservative organizations, particularly, the Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the authors, nevertheless, recognize a common message: “conservative students on campus – not by their own choosing but by the very nature of America’s liberally skewed higher education system – are ideologically at odds with the political and social commitments of the vast majority of faculty members, administrators, staff, and other student in American universities and colleges” (p. 78). To a large extent, this message resonates with or has penetrated the ways conservative students think of their position on campus. At both universities, the students feel that they are members of a marginalized minority and they seek out organizations for solidarity and friendships. In the case of Western Flagship, however, the sense of minority status is more deeply felt.
Chapters five and six are devoted to the particular styles of political action at the two universities. Both chapters introduce interesting new data. However, one particularly noteworthy finding deals with the ambitions of the students at the two universities. Students at Western Flagship tend to aspire to positions in local politics, whereas students at Eastern Elite have a national scope of their job prospects (pp. 206-8). Given the more general opposition to the mainstream of the GOP at Western Flagship, it is interesting that a radical conservative movement like the Tea Party began its politics locally and that the more radical elements in congress are in the House of Representatives. These chapters, which expand on the discussion of political styles introduced earlier, are followed by a seemingly out of place chapter on conservative femininity. This chapter both serves to hone in on the conservative response to a specific issue, gender, as well as to highlight the particular concerns of female conservative students. At Eastern Elite, female conservatives struggle more with the issue of what a conservative feminine identity means because they feel pressure for rejecting liberal feminism. Female students at Western Flagship tend to connect their femininity to the broader set of conservative concerns and feel less pressure to live up to social expectations.
Because of their emphasis on how the university environment molds the style of political engagement, the question emerges as to whether Binder and Wood’s book should be about conservatism alone. Would the authors have made similar findings had they inquired into the style of political action of liberal students? Further, there is the question of what kind of findings would have been uncovered had the researchers looked at a Western Elite and Eastern Public university. Is it the type of university that determines the form of political action or is geography an important factor? While addressing such concerns would have made for a much longer and more ambitious study, they do affect the extent to which lessons can be learned from this study. Are the authors’ findings the germ of a much more general theory about conservative youth activism? If so, we must try to understand what these students expectations are for the American political landscape and how they hope to contribute to its formation by being conservatives.
All this begs a question that the authors acknowledge is not part of their study and, more broadly, has receded into the background of most forms of social scientific inquiry: that of the role of personality formation in the development of political ideology. There has been a growing literature on political psychology that it would have been interesting for the authors to address. Still, this literature has also shunned the question of personality structure as an anachronistic field of psychological research. But, one is compelled to ask whether the avoidance of such a question ultimately inhibits deeper inquiry and the academic consensus restricts researchers from testing the uncomfortable hypotheses that might yield the acquisition of new kinds of data. These questions are not meant to dismiss Binder and Wood’s work, but, rather, to suggest where we might go from here. The fact that this study offers as much insight as it does and permits such questions to reemerge makes this book an important and exciting contribution.