In the early 1960s, colleges and universities in the United States had been politically quiescent for over a decade, following the changes and controversies that had roiled higher education in the 1930s and the post-World War II years when the G.I. Bill had paid the tuitions of large numbers of returning veterans. The demonstrations that erupted on campus by the later 1960s are usually associated with the causes of the political left, including the civil rights, antiwar, countercultural, and feminist movements. But for a while in the early part of the decade it was possible to think that a wave of conservatism would sweep American higher education.
Books like M. Stanton Evans’ 1961 Revolt on the Campus chronicled how organizations like Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) had a sizable and growing presence at colleges and universities across the country. Students on the right as well as the left shared an impatience with what they considered the boring conformity and unaccountable establishments of the 1950s. Both the youthful left and right also embraced an ethos of individualism, freedom, authenticity, and rebellion.
Of course, the universities were not taken over by rebellious conservatives in the 1960s. But as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd points out in her new book Resistance from the Right: Conservatives & the Campus Wars in Modern America, developments at colleges and universities during the late ‘60s were extremely important in forming the New Right of the 1970s, as well as having a lasting impact on the conservative movement and the Republican Party in decades to come.
Conservative students who were active on campuses from 1967-70 included future GOP and movement leaders such as Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Morton Blackwell, William Barr, and Jeff Sessions. These future leaders’ resistance to campus leftism during their student activist years provided formative lessons in organization and ideology that they would use in their careers as politicians, institution-builders, and influencers. And, as Shepherd argues in this podcast discussion, conservative student activism in the late ‘60s also shaped laws, policies, and precedents that continue to determine the course of higher education in the present day.
Transcript
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: When I started this project, I wanted to know, okay, there’s a clear line in the sand where traditionalists say, “We don’t cooperate with far-right fringe.” What I’m coming to find is that that line is not so strong. And I know that’s the way the story has always been told, but I don’t know that that story actually holds.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And it’s a pleasure to be joined today by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. She’s an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans. She is a historian of higher education from the 20th century to the present, with a particular focus on conservatism in the academy. And she is the author of a new book from the University of North Carolina Press entitled Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. Welcome, Lauren!
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Hi. Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s great to have you here. I remember that you and I had corresponded way back in January of 2020 when you were in the process of defending your Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Southern Mississippi. So congratulations on earning your Ph.D., and congrats on turning it into a book.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a big accomplishment. It’s worth celebrating.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Thank you. I remember that correspondence as well, and I was excited that you responded. I had reached out to a few different historians, and not everyone responds. I know people are busy. But I appreciated your feedback.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, it’s great to get a chance to talk. You and I also met up in person a few months ago at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History conference in Denver. And my recollection is that we agreed that although we have rather divergent views on higher education and the conservative movement in the 1960s, that there would be some value in having a civil podcast discussion to explore where we disagree. I did mention at the time that I didn’t want to debate, because I’m a bad debater and I would lose, but I would be interested to see where we might find some common ground.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes, absolutely. I think it’ll be very productive.
Geoff Kabaservice: Good. So can you briefly describe the thesis of Resistance from the Right,
and tell me something about how you came to pursue this topic?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd Sure. Well, maybe I can start answering those questions in reverse order if that’s okay. So the book was, of course, first my dissertation, but before that it was a paper in a history of higher ed course. I was taking this course either in 2015 or 2016, but it was around the time of the presidential election, and we were discussing the 1960s and campus upheaval. And I remember thinking, “Well, Donald Trump in 1968 would’ve been at Fordham, so where does he fall in this story?” And so I went looking for him in the archives and I didn’t find much, but I found some other names that were very familiar to me. I found Karl Rove, I found Bill Barr, I found Jeff Sessions, I found David Duke — lots of names all across the spectrum on the right. I felt like I hadn’t heard that story before about what students on the right were doing, so I just kept pulling on those threads. And then the paper became a dissertation and a book, and now I think it’s a career-long research interest of mine, probably.
Geoff Kabaservice: Terrific. And then how about the thesis overall?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes. So there are two theses to the book. One is that there were boisterous conservative students on campus in the 1960s — so that’s sort of my intervention in the literature — and also that the way that those students cut their political teeth, if you will, help set them up to become the New Right in the 1970s when they graduated. Usually when we think about the genesis of the New Right, we say that they got their start in the ‘70s, but actually they got their start in the ‘60s as teenagers, as eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds doing battle with the New Left on campus. So that’s one direction the book goes. The other story is that the things that they did were very influential. They literally shaped law, precedent, and policy for American higher education moving forward from the ’60s, and they’re still very influential over higher ed policy today.
Geoff Kabaservice: I look forward to talking about that. I always ask the people who come on this podcast to tell me something about themselves. So can you tell me anything along the lines of where you grew up, where you went to school, what some of your influences were, or what made you want to go to grad school?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Sure. I have lived in Mississippi my entire life. I was born here. I still live fifteen miles from where I grew up. My parents live around the corner. I also didn’t go far for school. I went to the University of Southern Mississippi, which is where both of my parents attended and also my brother, so we are diehard USM fans. I went to graduate school at William Carey University, which is a small private Baptist college also in Hattiesburg, and then returned to Southern Miss for my Ph.D. And in between there, I was a K-12 teacher. I taught history at a middle school and out of high school, and I also taught night college classes at a community college. So I guess that’s my professional background. And then now, of course, I work at the University of New Orleans.
In terms of influences… I mean, I grew up very conservative. I think your listeners can probably understand that based on my background and where I still live and who I’m still surrounded by today. Both of my parents are Donald Trump supporters. They can’t wait to vote for him again in 2024. I grew up Catholic. My mother is still a very devout Catholic. I attend mass with her pretty often when she asks me to, but I’m not practicing myself. I just go as a good sport and because it’s important to her. I’m very close with my family. We have five dogs. Let’s see… I have a Pilates and yoga practice that I keep up with pretty regularly.
Geoff Kabaservice: That sounds good. What is the origin of the name Lassabe?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: So from what I can tell — and this is not completely accurate, but I’ve done all of the DNA tests like 23andMe and Ancestry DNA — and what it looks like is the people who share that last name, or share my genes, seem to be in the southwestern corner of France and the northeastern corner of Spain, so the Basque region. And that would make sense to me. I obviously don’t speak Basque, but I know that phonetically it doesn’t fit with French or Spanish pronunciation. And then also just in my own crude internet research, just getting on Facebook and looking for people whose last name is Lassabe, they all tend to live about right there. And from my own ancestry research, from what I understand is my dad’s side of the family, my maiden name, came from Brittany, from that area of France and then settled in Canada and then came to New Orleans through the mouth of the Mississippi. And that’s all I know on my dad’s side. My mom’s side is much less clear.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have a very tenuous connection to the Basque Country. I used to be a singer in a Georgian-language singing group — that’s ex-Soviet Georgia. And it’s a non-Indo-European language, and it’s thought that the only language to which it may have some phonetic similarities is Basque.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Wow.
Geoff Kabaservice: That was pretty tenuous, like I said. Road trips are actually one of my hobbies, and I’ll drive hundreds of miles out of my way to visit college and university campuses. And the University of Southern Mississippi, I understand, has two campuses. What would I find if I were to visit them?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: So if you came to Hattiesburg, which is the main campus, it’s a gorgeous campus. I love our central administration building. Lots of gorgeous oak trees line in the campus. It’s a very traditional southern college in architecture, you could say. Some of the newer buildings that have been added on since the ’50s and ’60s have that Cold War architecture to them. They don’t have that traditional look, and I don’t prefer them. I know you didn’t ask that, but I’ll put that out there. The other campus is the Gulf Park campus. It’s in Long Beach on the Gulf of Mexico, on Highway 90, and it is absolutely gorgeous. It’s one of my favorite places to go. Even now when I need to use the library, I’ll go to that campus and go up to the top floor because it overlooks the water and this gorgeous lawn of more oak trees with Spanish moss. I mean, it’s hard to describe. If anyone is nearby and they have a chance to get down to Long Beach, they should definitely go see the campus. There’s actually a 500-year-old oak tree on the property. It’s legendary.
Geoff Kabaservice: Wow. That sounds idyllic. But let’s talk about the less idyllic aspect of higher education and its history…
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Sure.
Geoff Kabaservice: I was interested to read your book about campus activism in the 1960s, because that was the subject of my dissertation, lo those many years ago, and then my first book, which centered on the figure of Kingman Brewster Jr., who was the president of Yale University from 1964 to 1977. So to set the stage for this discussion, let me give listeners a little bit of a background in the development of American higher education in the years leading up to this late 1960s period that is your focus.
Higher education was once upon a time mainly the preserve of the moneyed classes, and not many Americans went to colleges or universities of any description. In 1900, I think that there were about 200,000 students enrolled in some form of post-secondary education, which was only about maybe two-tenths of one percent of all college-age Americans. But those numbers rose steadily over the course of the 20th century, particularly after World War II when the G.I. Bill paid the tuitions of returning male veterans. And that did a lot to make higher education more of a catalytic factor, I think, in promoting upward mobility. You note in your book that by 1955, the total college enrollment was 2.5 million students, and that it soared over the next two decades, reaching 8.8 million in 1974.
Now, there had been a student movement on campus during the 1930s, some of which was left-leaning (as in the case of socialists and pacifists) and some of which was arguably right-leaning (as in the case of the isolationists in the America First Committee that sought to keep the United States out of World War II). The G.I. Bill years brought some of that ferment back to campus. So William F. Buckley Jr., who in many ways is the founder of the intellectual conservative movement, happened to be an undergraduate at Yale in those years, and he wrote God and Man at Yale as an appeal to the university’s ultra-conservative alumni to resist the incursions of Keynesian economics and secularism that he felt were creeping into the classrooms along with these returning veterans. But after the last of those veterans graduated in the early ‘50s, the campuses were mostly politically quiescent, I would say, until the early 1960s when there began to again be student movements on both the left and the right. Does that sound accurate?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes, although if I had to maybe put an asterisk by anything, it would be that if you were alluding to say, Berkeley in 1964 as the beginning of a campus student movement, I would say that that’s extremely unrepresentative of American higher ed generally, in the same way that Harvard today and what we’ve just seen in the headlines throughout the month of December is unrepresentative of higher ed broadly. But it was headline-making, sure, and maybe we can point to it as the beginning of something. But I don’t really think the campuses had become really heated up until about 1967.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay, point taken. Tell me about Young Americans for Freedom and ISI, because these were two of the early conservative campus organizations that actually made some commentators feel in the early 1960s that the big wave of the future was going to be conservative student activism.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Sure. So YAF and ISI are both Buckley projects. They are two of three or four groups that I profile in the book, but we’ll start with ISI because it came first. So ISI was founded in 1953 or 1954 by Buckley — he is the first president of it — Buckley and others associated with the conservative movement. And it’s designed to be an intellectual organization. It’s still around today. If you look at the website and if you read their mailers, they’re still interested in the same thing. They’re trying to identify conservative students, trying to educate them in what they believe is a proper curriculum, say, based in the great books of the Western tradition, and help nudge them towards faculty positions — or at least, if not faculty, graduate school, law school, and so on.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just a pedantic position, but when we say “ISI,” the organization was originally founded as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists — because at that point Buckley didn’t like the term “conservative,” it had too many bad associations. So he and Frank Chodorov founded it as a libertarian-leaning group that, as you point out in the book, was supposed to counter what had been the Intercollegiate Society of Socialists, which had been around since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s now known as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and it’s headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. And perhaps one of its unlikelier graduates is Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: ISI has had some very important alumni, for sure. And it’s interesting that you mentioned the shift in what the organization stands for, its acronym. Young Americans for Freedom also has had a similar change in its name. YAF is now Young Americas Foundation. There’s also Young Americans for Liberty, YAL, which is a libertarian spinoff of YAF. And I talk about them a little bit in my book and the divisions that took place in 1969. Like ISI, YAF is also a conservative youth organization. It’s for people under thirty years old, or maybe it’s forty. I don’t know, maybe you know. I focus on the college students. I think it’s under thirty.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s right.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. Anyway… No, no, you know what I’m thinking of? “Don’t trust anyone under thirty” — that expression from that era. Maybe you have to be under forty. Anyway, Young Americans for Freedom, at the time that I write about them from 1967 to 1970, was an activist organization. They were truly bipartisan. They had elder mentors from both political parties. Of course, the Democrats tended to be Southern Democrats: people like Strom Thurmond who were conservative. So even though it was bipartisan, it definitely had a right ideological bent to it. And that’s, of course, because the parties at that point hadn’t become ideologically sorted as they are today.
Young Americans for Freedom, yes, they were activists. The place that you might find them on campus is at a counter-protest to some New Left demonstration. If the peaceniks were protesting against the war, YAF would be there with their signs picketing, saying, “This is a fight against anti-communism, and we support our troops.” And they would be there representing, in their mind, the patriotic stance, an anti-communist stance.
Geoff Kabaservice: I can’t cite you chapter and verse, but I feel like at some point you referred to YAF or maybe ISI as “an astroturf group.” Do I remember that correctly?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: Why was that?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: I didn’t come up with the term “astroturf.” That’s a term that sometimes we see bandied about in politics. “Astroturf” is meant to signify the opposite of something that is grassroots or organic or natural. And so the reason that I say that YAF was astroturf is not because some of those students didn’t genuinely hold those feelings. I say it’s astroturf because a lot of the things they did… They were very disorganized. I actually spend all of Chapter Three talking about their troubles organizing and how they needed mentors like Buckley and others. I use him as an example all the time. But there were other mentors at, say, Modern Age magazine and other places who really corralled these students and said, “Look, this is how you organize. If you’re going to write, send me drafts of your stuff and let me edit, make sure that it looks the way it needs to look. This is how you publish an underground campus paper, and here’s how you pay for it all.”
They taught them how to fundraise. In fact, College Republicans were the best fundraisers of all of the groups that I discussed. College Republicans, their leader in 1969 was a young man named Karl Rove at the University of Utah, and he created this really phenomenal handbook that had scripts for young students going door-to-door. I mean, it literally told them, “This is what you need to wear. These are the places that you need to visit. This is how you ask for a referral, and this is word-for-word what you need to say to ask for this exact amount of money” — and of course, the total is something large, like what would be a thousand dollars today. And the whole logic there, I remember Rove writing, is that if you ask for a larger donation, the donor will be flattered and they will be more likely to give to you.
Geoff Kabaservice: That was an interesting episode. Just parenthetically, the College Republicans, like the Teen Age Republicans and the Young Republicans, are constituent groups within the official Republican Party. And these were the venues where conservatives fought with moderates and, in some cases, liberal Republicans to try to get influence in first these subsidiary organizations and then eventually the larger Republican Party.
But let me actually say one reason why I don’t like this term “astroturf” applied to a group like YAF… First of all, astroturf is a bit of an anachronistic term. I don’t think astroturf was even invented until the latter half of the 1960s, and it was mostly then associated with the Houston Astros, hence the name. But I think all of these campus activist groups, including Students for a Democratic Society, were in some measure working not only on campus but also with elders off-campus.
I found this article in Mademoiselle magazine, of all places, that came from the summer of 1961 and that was a really sophisticated breakdown of student activism on campus. And it turned out to be written by Tom Hayden, who at that time was just a junior from the University of Michigan; no one had heard of him at that point as an activist. And at that point, it actually looked like YAF was a much more vital, non-astroturf group compared to SDS. Because SDS only had at that point maybe 575-600 members on twenty different campus chapters. It was itself the product of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which derived from the League for Industrial Democracy, which spun off from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Its svengali and guru was Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers, and it was he who made available the UAW summer retreat in Port Huron, Michigan, where the “Port Huron Statement” was later written by Tom Hayden himself in 1962.
And YAF at that point, by contrast, had 24,000 members, at least listed. Obviously these stats are always a little inflated, but it had some presence on over a hundred campuses, and it really was visible and it had media attention. And there were curious similarities between YAF and the early SDS. They were both young, idealistic. They had moral urgency. They didn’t trust the liberal establishment. They wanted change. They were bored with Eisenhower-era stability. And there was a quote in that Tom Hayden article from a student leader who said, “We do not want to be told what we must do. We want to be self-determined,” and that turned out to be not someone from SDS but Robert Schuchman, who was then the head of YAF. So what were the causes around which the campus right organized in the 1960s and into the later 1960s?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: So the argument that I make is that because they had so many intergroup tiffs and squabbles, the thing that united them (and the thing that their elder mentors helped them to find) was a common enemy in the left. And so even if traditionalists and libertarians and objectivists and others couldn’t find common cause together in their own policies, at least they all agreed, “We don’t like SDS, and we don’t like the Black Panthers, and we don’t like these radical groups, these anti-capitalist groups, these anti-imperialist groups who are making noise on campus” — and in many cases literally shutting down the campus through strikes.
One of the things that YAF spearheaded was a series of lawsuits against institutions — and this actually predates Kent State in 1970; they’re doing this I think as early as 1969, but maybe 1968. But YAF essentially says, “Look, if there’s a strike on campus, we have already paid our tuition in full for this semester. We are owed an education. We can’t have the campus shut down.” And so that’s an example of one of the things that they would do.
I also saw a really fascinating parallel with this during COVID, during campus closures in 2020 and 2021. There were also lawsuits from students saying, “No, I’ve paid tuition, I’ve borrowed student loan money, I’m owed this education. We can’t shut down.” And of course, there’s debates about, “Well, does this education have to be in person or can it take place over Zoom or in some other way?” But it was just an interesting parallel to see, because I was still writing the book at that point and trying to keep tabs on both instances closely.
You mentioned something about all of the commonalities between SDS and YAF, and there’s even more. I alluded to earlier that there were some tensions in Young Americans for Freedom that caused a major schism in 1969, but we see the same thing in SDS. It breaks up too in 1969, and it splits off into the Weather Underground and the Weathermen, and these more violent factions compared to the larger group. And also both groups were really known for over-exaggerating their membership totals.
I wrote this book not to do a comparison of YAF and SDS because that actually already exists. It’ll take me a second, but I can find this book. It’s by Rebecca Klatch, and the name of the book is A Generation Divided. It’s from 1999, so it’s a couple of decades old now, but you can still find it. And she talks about the differences in the group. And so those things are there, and I don’t mean to not talk about them, it’s just that I wanted the focus to be on what was the right doing. Because even if you’d never read Rebecca Klatch, so many former new leftists went on to write their own memoirs, their own history, and their story really dominates. But there doesn’t seem to be a good understanding about what was the right doing.
Geoff Kabaservice: The split within YAF had to do with the split between libertarians and traditionalists. These were two legs of the three-legged stool that was fusionist conservatism as promulgated by Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, and other people around National Review. And eventually the libertarians found that they actually had a lot in common with the cultural left on campus in their opposition to prohibitions against drugs, in their opposition to the draft, maybe in their embrace of cultural radicalism more generally. And I agree that you do see some similar parallels on the side of the left as well. I was fascinated, too, to see that there was an attempt by some of the traditionalists to keep up with the cultural changes going on in areas that the generation broadly embraced — like music.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: You referred at one point to this woman named Nancy Jones, who’s called “the Square Cher.”
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: I love it.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: In Greenwich Village of all places. You really do see that too in YAF at the chapter level, where these differences are really pronounced. So a lot of the libertarian chapters would’ve been in Pennsylvania as a state but really also focused in Philadelphia, but also in Arizona and Southern California. Another name that I don’t talk about in the book, because he did not give me permission to interview him, but I can still mention him because I did find him in an archive in Southern California: Dana Rohrabacher. He was a folk singer in the 1960s. He openly discussed his marijuana usage. And he would’ve been more on the libertarian side. Now he’s an extremely Trumpy character.
Another thing that I’ve always really liked to try to track is the slide of characters between the left and the right. There are some really famous examples of people who were anti-communist and then move to the right, Whittaker Chambers being probably the best known.
Geoff Kabaservice: People who were actually on the communist side to begin with.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes. Far left, strongly to the left, and then moved right. Daniel Horowitz is another one that comes to mind. But even within the right, I like seeing that slide from libertarian to more traditionalist or vice versa. And Dana Rohrabacher, I think, is a prime example.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, of course there’s always something to be said for the horseshoe theory. But to go back to something you said earlier, it seems to me in my reading of most college campuses in the 1960s that the student body was still largely quiescent…
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: …that it was a minority of activists on both the left and the right.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Absolutely. And where the left picked up in anti-war demonstrations, this is not because students were like, “Oh yes, I really agree with some of SDS’s causes, and I’ve read the Port Huron Statement.” That’s not what was happening. It was that the draft had been reformed so that anyone could be drafted, anyone could be sent to Vietnam regardless of if you had a student exemption or not. And so that in 1969 is really when we see explosions on campus. And of course, the most famous incident comes after the invasion of Cambodia and the response to that at Kent State. But as soon as the draft is reformed again, those protests dwindle. So it’s not like SDS is really capturing hearts and minds and bringing people into its cause; it was that students didn’t want to be drafted. They didn’t want to go to Vietnam.
You didn’t have all of these especially white students — the campuses were still very largely white — and I don’t mean HBCUs, I mean your state universities — you don’t have lots of white students joining in on civil rights protests or marching alongside Black Panthers. You do have some, but they’re very unrepresentative and they really take place on the coastal campuses and some exceptional Midwestern states like at Madison at the University of Wisconsin. But you certainly don’t see that in the South. You don’t see that other places in the Midwest or in the Northeast.
Geoff Kabaservice: Here again, though, I would actually say that in the early 1960s there was widespread student sympathy for civil rights activism even though it was only a tiny minority that actually put their bodies on the line trying to bring about integration in the South. Does that seem accurate to you?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: That does. And of course, we’re talking about integration in places like lunch counters and pharmacies. We’re not talking about sitting next to each other in classrooms. That definitely wasn’t the case in the South. In fact, southern universities… Brown v. Board applies to K-12, and that is, of course, in 1955, 1954. But in southern universities, there’s really not mass integration the way you could look around a campus today and see lots of diversity. That doesn’t take place until the ‘80s. Even in the ‘70s, you may only have one or two black faculty members. You’re not going to have lots of Black Studies programs offered on most campuses. And that’s because HBCUs are still the norm. And you could even make the same argument about women. There are still women’s colleges in the South and the Midwest.
Geoff Kabaservice: You do point out the example of Jay Parker, who was probably the best known African American member of YAF, who founded the Lincoln Institute after he graduated from college and its magazine, the Lincoln Review. I believe he was a mentor to Clarence Thomas. He had correspondence and relationships with other figures like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. But he was one of the very few on the conservative side who was Black.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. He is another really interesting case. I have a book that he wrote, and I cannot remember… It’s on the shelf behind me. It’s about crime. Anyway, one of his close associates sent it to me along with several of his writings and his journals, and I actually haven’t… They’re all sitting here at my feet. They’re in a manila folder in a box that I still need to go through. But he’s another interesting case. I like trying to find the exceptions to the rule and seeing what is it about these people that make them so exceptional.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I do recall that there was an episode where Jay Parker was along with a YAF group in the South, and they were turned away from some venue…
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: …in Florida.
Geoff Kabaservice: …in Florida. Can you tell me more about that?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: No, I can’t, only because I don’t know much more. I’m aware of that anecdote too, but that’s all that I know.
Geoff Kabaservice: So it’s not, I think, that these conservative groups were dead set against the end of Jim Crow. But on the other hand, their cultural sympathies broadly were against change, which in the early 1960s put them on the side of keeping Jim Crow in place, so to speak.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Sure. And I do also profile some of the extreme-right students; these would be the far-right students like David Duke and others. There weren’t very many of them that I found in the archive. That’s actually my next project: looking at faculty on the far right. That seems to be from the ‘70s moving forward. We can talk more about that if you’re interested. But we would not say that students in YAF were anti-racists. We couldn’t go that far.
Geoff Kabaservice: Not certainly by current definitions. I mean, in terms of funny anecdotes, I believe that the head of the American Nazi Party in the 1960s was George Lincoln Rockwell, and he ended up getting assassinated by dissident members of his Nazi Party in Arlington, Virginia, just two miles away from where I am right now. But he graduated from Brown University, which is not usually associated with being a hotbed of Nazism, shall we say.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: No, you wouldn’t think that. Actually, a hotbed of Nazism was my own alma mater. I’m coming to learn from work in the archive at Southern Miss that we had at least three faculty that I’ve identified whose faculty lines were paid for through money from the Pioneer Fund, which is a far-right white nationalist organization — although I don’t think there’s much money left in the fund, I don’t think they’re super active — but that spirit is still there on the far right to find faculty who will produce race science. And they wrote for magazines like the Mankind Quarterly and also the Journal of Indo-European Studies, which was founded at Southern Miss. So these people are there. They didn’t show up in my book because I wasn’t looking for them yet, but I have stumbled across them since.
But when we were talking about segregation earlier, there were in the 1960s students that organized in small groups — the University of Minnesota had a contingent of eight students, I think, who were armed, and they brought weapons to campus and they were ready to do battle with Black students. And they passed Nazi paraphernalia around. And then of course, famously there’s an image of David Duke at… Duke was a student at LSU, but in this picture he’s actually on the Tulane campus in New Orleans. And he is carrying a sign that says “Gas the Chicago Seven,” and on the back there’s a reference to the attorney for the Chicago Seven being Jewish and a communist. And he’s wearing a swastika on his armband, so it’s all in the mix.
And David Duke and some of the organizations… He founded at least three different campus groups, and I think they’re all the same students. It’s the same exact rosters. They just have different names to look like it’s a bigger movement than it is. But they claimed, as did Students for George Wallace in 1968, they claimed to be active alongside YAF in some of YAF’s biggest counter-protests, like at Columbia in 1968.
When I started this project, I wanted to find the solid dividing lines. I wanted to know, okay, there’s a clear line in the sand where traditionalists say, “We don’t cooperate with far-right fringe.” But what I’m coming to find is that that line is not so strong. And I know that’s the way the story has always been told, especially when we think about Buckley and the National Review writing out the far right, writing out the John Birch Society (or at least Robert Welch if not the John Birch Society), writing out Ayn Rand. But I don’t know that that story actually holds, if you just scratch the surface.
I’ve been able to find Revilo Oliver, who is a far-right character that does appear in the book and that I’m still researching now. Revilo Oliver ultimately becomes a Holocaust denier, and he writes in Holocaust-denying magazines. He’s also in the pages of the National Review. And, of course, in the ‘60s, Buckley will say, “I’m sorry, we can no longer publish your stuff.” But if you had been a reader since National Review’s founding, and you had seen Revilo Oliver’s name in a byline, you would be familiar with who he was. And when you found him in other publications like American Opinion or later American Mercury, you would say, “I know this guy. He’s a fellow traveler. Maybe I haven’t seen him in National Review in a few years, but this is my guy. He’s on my side.”
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s actually a book published in 2021 by Matthew Ehrlich called Dangerous Ideas on Campus…
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes, phenomenal.
Geoff Kabaservice: …which points out that the University of Illinois had a very hard time getting rid of Revilo Oliver because they had fired Leo Koch, a left-leaning professor, in 1960 for writing a letter to the student newspaper where he basically said, “If students want to have premarital sex, that should be okay.” So the universities were really in new territory with a lot of these extremes, shall we say, in politics.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Absolutely. Well, one big difference… I’m so glad that you brought that example up and Matthew Ehrlich’s book up. So in the case of Oliver, my first question when I stumbled upon this was, “Okay, does Oliver even matter? Isn’t he just a one-off? Isn’t he just, again, part of the far-right fringe?” He didn’t influence anyone. Did any of his students become neo-Nazis? And from what I can tell his students didn’t. But he was able to radicalize organizations like AAUP to his defense to say, “This man should not be fired. This is freedom of speech. This is academic freedom.”
And so in that sense, Oliver is a really good case about the dangers of free speech absolutism, because you’re platforming these people. Of course, “platforming” as a verb didn’t exist back then, so I’m going to use it historically. But you’re platforming these people to spew these ideas. And while other academics can take them on their face and say, “No, this is nonsense, we don’t take this guy seriously,” readers — Oliver famously wrote this conspiracy theory about the JFK assassination called “Marxism in Dallas” — so readers of that who can see underneath the byline, “This is a tenured professor at the University of Illinois. He’s a professor of the Classics. He speaks twelve languages. He’s world-traveled” — they might not be able to critically examine that in the way that other faculty members can just wave him off as being some kook. So his academic affiliation actually gives him some credibility towards readers or people who listened to him speak. Because he also went on several John Birch Society speaking tours, and he, I guess, arranged his own speaking tours. He encountered people all over. And that’s the first thing that you learn about him is that he is a professor and he’s still a professor — he hasn’t been fired.
Geoff Kabaservice: So to pick up on a question that you raised about Oliver, what do you think were the successes of the conservative movement on campus writ large?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: The argument that I make in the book is about them setting policy precedent and long-lasting influences. One is that administrators themselves realize that they have to come out and make statements. So if I can reach back to the Harvard example that I mentioned earlier, about a month ago, Claudine Gay and other presidents had their infamous grilling — if I can call it that, if I can be so candid — with Representatives Foxx and Stefanik. And since that, it just ballooned into something else, and then ultimately she had to resign. The pretense for all of this is that she didn’t make the public statement that one political party wanted to hear from her.
That was completely unheard of in the 1960s. It was expected that presidents didn’t comment on what their students were doing on campus. Presidents don’t talk to the media — that’s beneath them, that’s not a dignified thing to do. And now anytime anything happens, it’s expected. We’re turning to our alma maters and saying, “What statement has the president issued?” That’s a completely new thing. So that’s one example.
The other thing is that there is a quieting of protest because of so many pieces of legislation that went through designed to punish protesters. So if you were caught protesting or burning a draft card, depending on which state you were in, some states had laws that said you could be expelled. If you had been arrested in a campus protest, you obviously would be expelled. And then that, of course, in the time of Vietnam War, carried implications for being drafted. There’s a whole new field of student personnel studies. And in my own discipline of higher education administration, there’s a professional field that is designed to mitigate risk associated with student protests. Of course it’s a legal concern too, but it also comes out of a political concern as well.
I’m trying to think of examples… Because the understanding today is that higher ed is very liberal, very left-leaning. And that’s just something that I probably would’ve agreed with when I started this project. But after having completed it, it’s something that I completely disagree with. The campuses themselves are certainly not woke, as the claim goes. You might find that in the humanities departments or in history or English departments, maybe even in social sciences, but you certainly don’t find that in the hard sciences. You don’t find that among administrators, certainly not among trustees or in graduate schools. The law school is not woke in the same way the military is not woke. These are just political insults meant to draw suspicion around institutions that the right doesn’t like.
Geoff Kabaservice: You told me at the conference that your book had received pushback from the left.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yes.
Geoff Kabaservice: What is it that the left would find to criticize here?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: I hope I’m not repeating myself… I guess this is new for listeners. We talked about how my book had been reviewed in Politico, but also in Jacobin and some other places. And I wasn’t really sure how it had been received. I had not much hate mail, but I had some hate mail from people that I would assume are on the right, and that’s okay. But from the left, I had arguments that I didn’t go far enough. I won’t mention names, but there is a famous historian of the right, probably the foremost historian of the right, who I sent my book to, and he kindly responded and said that he wouldn’t blurb it or wouldn’t review it because he didn’t think that it was… I forget exactly how he worded it, but he didn’t think that I was making a convincing enough argument. And so again, that’s coming from the left. He is a historian of the right, but he’s certainly firmly on the left.
Geoff Kabaservice: Without any reference to that interaction, I couldn’t help but laugh that Jacobin thought that your book didn’t have enough Corey Robin in it — which is a very on-brand criticism for Jacobin, I must say.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. And I’ll go ahead and say Corey Robin was not the person that didn’t want to review my book. The person who didn’t want to review it is a journalist-historian.
Geoff Kabaservice: So it sounds like what you’re saying, then, is that the right actually was pretty successful on campus.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. That is absolutely my thesis.
Geoff Kabaservice: Which certainly runs counter to what the right itself believes. The right believes that Republicans and certainly conservatives have been entirely marginalized from the humanities, the social sciences, however many people may have somewhat privately held conservative beliefs in the social sciences. They don’t feel that the university world is anything that they have any responsibility to preserve, which has led to all kinds of calls to defund the universities, particularly the biggest ones with the largest endowments. It seems that there’s a bit of a disjuncture of views here.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Well, I would say that’s actually the horseshoe working again. Because the left also has the same criticism about forcing large institutions, or institutions with large endowments like Harvard or UT Austin, to draw down their endowments — for completely different reasons, but it cashes out the same.
Geoff Kabaservice: This is true.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: I just don’t think that campuses are these woke institutions that they’re meant to be. And partly there’s media coverage to blame for that. How many stories did the New York Times, the paper of record, run about the Claudine Gay situation — about her, about accusations of plagiarism, and then ultimately about her resignation?
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me give you somewhat of a different take here. I don’t think that the conservative movement in the 1960s was particularly effective in achieving its goals, which is to say universities did not cease being left-leaning institutions. The right may have tried to get more of its members to become professors, but that certainly didn’t succeed outside of specifically conservative campuses like Hillsdale.
But where they were successful, I think, was more with public opinion. You point out that in the late ‘60s, left-leaning student protest actually turned to violence. There was an armed occupation of the student building at Cornell University by the Afro-American Society. You note that 4,330 bombs exploded on college campuses between the beginning of 1969 and mid-April 1970; there was a student killed at a bombing at the University of Wisconsin, for example. And this led to a real public revulsion, I would say, against student activism once it crossed over from civil protest to actual violence and radicalism. And you note that 60% of Americans actually approved of the Kent State killings in 1970, and even larger margins disapproved of disruptive student protests generally. And this, I believe, fed into Richard Nixon’s victory in the presidential race of 1968, and then his overwhelming reelection victory in 1972.
It seems to me that the people who came out of the campus protests who became influential in conservative circles went down two tracks. On the one hand, a lot of professors became neoconservatives, as we would now think of them, because they were so upset about what had happened to the universities. Allan Bloom and Walter Berman and a number of other people left Cornell, for example, and I would argue that the scars of that conflict in 1969 are still present in Cornell to this day.
And then on the other hand, the conservative activists went into this increasingly lavish infrastructure of support groups, which extended to the campus and then beyond. And I just read Tina Nguyen’s book called The MAGA Diaries, which is about her own personal experiences with the Leadership Institute, which is one of these organizations formed by Morton Blackwell, who appears in your book. And the Heritage Institute can put people up in dorms in Washington, D.C., and there’s lavish stipends, and they can channel you into conservative journals and think tanks. There’s really a kind of infrastructure on the right that doesn’t even begin to find parallels on the left. And a lot of it grows out of this 1960 campus activism that you describe.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. Many of those think tanks — not the ones that you mentioned, but there are others like FEE, AEI — they do predate the ‘60s by several decades. I think some of them go back to the 1930s. They’re part of this anti-New Deal wave. But certainly, as you mentioned, the two tracks that graduates take on the right is to not just join those think tanks but create new ones. The Heritage Foundation is a good example. The National Journalism School. And they all have the same purpose as ISI: not necessarily to train people for academia, but to train scholars to go into the field of law or into journalism or what have you.
So the right really does do an excellent job of identifying, nurturing, and supporting, funding young people for lifelong careers. And I think the clearest example that we’ve seen most recently in the news is Heritage’s plans for Project 2025. There are other groups that have similar designs, but I think Heritage’s Project 2025 is probably the best known right now; at least it’s the one I’m most familiar with that’s been covered recently in the media. But for listeners who are not familiar with it, it’s a blueprint or a plan for potentially a Trump victory, but even further beyond that for any Republican or any conservative that gets into office. This is a long list, 900 pages, of the right’s plan for what an administration should look like and who should staff the positions there. It calls for a massive gutting of 50,000 employees to be replaced by hand-chosen members that the right deems worthy (or at least is willing to invest in) to put in these positions. So as you said, there’s nothing like that infrastructure on the left.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there’s supposedly 25,000 names on a conservative LinkedIn that’s being developed by both Heritage and other affiliated Trumpy groups. Let me also mention something that I came across when I was looking at student activism on the right in the 1960s. It seems to me that one of the longstanding, influential tendencies was a word that I can’t use — rat-effing, let’s say — which actually comes out of the fraternity culture at the University of Southern California. And these are people, like Donald Segretti who went into the Nixon administration, who perfected the art of dirty tricks: stealing, ballots, spreading rumors about your opponents…
And although that was developed independently, it also played into a longer tradition where, weirdly enough, conservatives took a page from the book of Communist organizations trying to penetrate organizations like American veterans groups in the wake of World War II. And you list some of these same kind of tactics that the conservatives groups used, whether it was YAF students trying to penetrate College Republicans or Young Republicans. These included creating front groups; spreading out in an auditorium in the diamond formation so as to make it seem like there’s actually more of you than there really are; using the process to hold a meeting that goes until 3:00 AM at which everybody gets bored and tired and leaves, at which point you ram your emotion through. These are all ways that a small and disciplined minority can bend a larger organization to its will. And I think those dynamics are still in play on the right even to this day.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. And that’s definitely something you see come more from the traditionalists than the libertarians. I think that the libertarians have done really well, especially working across the aisle, because Democrats are so willing to put in place neoliberal policies. We talked earlier about fusionism, and I think what I’ve seen (and what I’ve heard other people explain better than I’m about to say) is that the project of fusionism since Trump seems to have unwound. Because traditionalists feel like they’ve made this negotiation with libertarians, but here we are 60-70 years later and it hasn’t cashed out for them in the way that, perhaps, libertarian gains have been made.
And I think there’s something to that. I think that explains Trump’s success really well. Even for Trump voters who don’t think that he is a perfect candidate or a perfect leader, I think that they like the brashness and the America Firstness of it all, and not having to work across the aisle or even work within their own party. Anyone who is not at this point a Trump loyalist is not a member of the Republican Party, or at least not one with much purchase. There’s Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mitt Romney… There’s so many examples of people who’ve stood up to Trump and been popped on the hand for it and have lost their careers for it.
Geoff Kabaservice: And I think that the Manichaeanism of the movement that has come to affect the whole Republican Party also is very conducive to grift. And you give some examples of that going back to the 1960s as well.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah. I also extend the grift thesis to Oliver. I mentioned I’m working on the project of far-right faculty, and so Revilo Oliver certainly is a main character right now. But from what I can tell, Oliver received a lot of money from very deep pockets to go on his speaking tours. I’m sure he would’ve been paid for his written pieces as well, but I think the real money came from speaking at Birch events. And the same thing with the faculty that I found at Southern Miss. They all received money from the Pioneer Fund worth several thousands of dollars. For example, one of the main faculty members, I think his salary was something like $25,000 in 1970, which would’ve been unheard of for a faculty member. So the grift is there. Are these people ideological purists? Probably not. I’m suspect of that. I think they just follow where the money goes. And then you see the grift also on the right with especially podcasters.
Geoff Kabaservice: Uh-oh, present company excluded?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: I’m thinking of the Ben Shapiros and others who have just found a way to be provocative and antagonistic, and draw attention to themselves, and cash that out.
Geoff Kabaservice: You had asked me way back in your Ph.D. thesis days why I thought the student movement seemed to collapse after 1970. And I felt at the time (and I still do feel) that the waning of the economy had as much or more to do with that than any kind of legislation that might have passed trying to clamp down on campus activism. I think that the incredible growth in wages and productivity, and just the sense that opportunity was always going to be there, was one of the real stimulants to student idealism and participation in student activism. And when the air went out of that tire, people really adhered more to what Kingman Brewster called “grim professionalism” — just a sense of going back to college with an eye toward getting a job and productive employment afterwards.
But I also think that what we saw on campus in the 1960s, and have seen to the present day, is the growth of what Thomas Piketty has called Brahmin Leftism: the idea that people on the left now think about cultural issues and questions of racial and ethnic identity more than they think about the working class and achieving broad-based increases in prosperity for one and all. Do you think there’s anything to that?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Yeah, I think that person exists. I wouldn’t call them on the left. I would say that that’s a liberal.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Only because, and here’s why… So in the leftist spaces that I keep up with, there’s definitely a concern for material… I am trying not to use the word Marxism, but it’s definitely there. But there is a concern about the materialism of it all. Do people have food on the table? Are they gainfully employed? Are they members of unions if they need to be, if they’re precariously employed or whatever it is? But that made me think of criticisms right now of DEI programs. So there’s a left and a right understanding of DEI, and from the left it’s that DEI doesn’t do anything, that it’s toothless. And then from the right, of course, it’s that it’s dangerous and something that is un-American and poisonous to us, all poisonous to the culture. So I really do think that far leftists and people firmly on the right could sit down and come to some agreement about what problems are there. The difference is the work they do to land at that spot; the reasons are completely different.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a surprisingly optimistic take.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: I hope so. I don’t have a lot of optimism for the future, at least not for the future of higher ed right now. I don’t think it’s headed in a good direction.
Geoff Kabaservice: So speaking of that, what is your longer-term project on higher education that you mentioned?
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: This investigation right now of far-right faculty. So it’s people like Oliver, it’s people like Roger Pearson, who was at the University of Southern Mississippi, and others who were hired with him in, from what I can tell, a group hire. For listeners who aren’t familiar with him, Pearson is famously a white nationalist, a neo-Nazi, and a race scientist. So there’s that aspect to it. And then for Oliver and others who I’ve been able to follow as academics who came out of the John Birch Society, there seems to be a conspiratorial anti-Semitism flavor to their politics. I don’t have a thesis. I am at the very beginning. I’m trying to find these (hopefully) exceptional figures among the faculty. But maybe they’re not so exceptional. They did have long careers.
Geoff Kabaservice: I wish you luck with your project, Lauren.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: And congratulations on the publication of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. And thank you very much for joining me today.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd: Thanks for having me.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C