Studying the Students Can Teach Useful Lessons

W hile it’s true that college students were active in the recent election as organizers of get-out-the- vote campaigns, supporters of candidates, and especially as voters, there is much more to student political activism than electoral work. 

Students are politically active on campuses across the country, not just in the bicoastal urban hotspots of traditional campus activism like New York and Berkeley. Recent media exposure has heightened the public’s awareness of the growth of conservative campus activism, so much so that one might draw the conclusion that college students are racing to be counted as members of the new Republican majority. But the truth is that most students remain uninvolved politically, with the exception of voting in presidential elections. Several factors compete with going to meetings, riding the bus to Washington for a demonstration, or sitting at an information table on the quad. There is plenty to do on campus besides political work. Not surprisingly, other organizations far outnumber political groups. The economic truth is that most students are uninvolved because they must work (and borrow money) to attend college, a condition that sharpens their sense of the value of their education while limiting their free time. 

Political Research Associate’s recently published study of campus activism, Deliberate Differences, Progressive and Conservative Campus Activism in the United States, provides helpful insight into the realities of political activity on campus. While the number of activist groups is small, progressive groups outnumber conservative ones four to one. According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Center, more first-year students identify as liberal (27 percent) versus conservative (23 percent), with the remaining 50 percent labeling themselves as independent or unaffiliated. 

A quick look at progressive goals and tactics on campus shows they are very similar to the work of off-campus progressive activism. Groups tend to emerge issue by issue, developing commitment and consciousness around those issues, with the goal of developing movements based on topical issues on and off campus. This holds true whether the arena is the environment, LGBT issues, anti-militarism, or anti-racist work. Coalitions and other cross-issue work are seen as added, but labor-intensive, benefits. More discussion revolves around process and decision-making than around long-term goals and strategies. There is no clear agreement on what is effective organizing. It all sounds quite familiar to seasoned community activists. 

Conservative groups, on the other hand, present a very different picture when we look at their goals and strategies. The purpose of conservative student organizing seems less to build a social or political movement on campus than to develop a future generation of leadership for the Right as a whole. National conservative organizations, whose programs were created specifically to work with college students, provide extensive support and training. The Leadership Institute, Young America’s Foundation, and the Fund for American Studies are only the best known of a collection of well-funded training providers, which includes wings of established groups like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and the Independent Women’s Forum whose directors emeritae includes Lynne Cheney. 

The strategies conservative student groups use are both creative and effective, high-volume megaphoning with few actual students involved. Their style, on the other hand, is much more controversial. Students attempt to disrupt what they call the unfair liberal dominance on campus in various ways. They claim they are a silenced minority, relegated to second-class status by students and discriminated against by liberal faculty. They call for more room for conservative thought, framing it as more “diversity of thought,” co-opting liberal language. They criticize progressive ideas as unpatriotic, intellectually empty, or simply deserving of ridicule. When liberal Brian Boyko wrote a post-election opinion piece in his student newspaper the Daily Texan , for instance, he announced he was leaving the United States because he was disappointed with U.S. voters’ conservative views. The Young Conservatives of Texas Austin branch responded by creating an essay contest on the topic “Why I Want to Leave America,” offering the winner a one-way ticket to Canada. 

Conservative students establish their own newspapers, often funded by the National Collegiate Network, insisting their views are unrepresented in the mainstream campus media. Some attempt takeovers of student governments in order to gain control of the mainstream campus agenda as well as to have access to the spending of student activities fees. Popular speakers like Dinesh D’Souza and Ann Coulter, often funded by national organizations, tour campuses with a carefully constructed conservative message for students. Such speakers model a style of demonization, scapegoating, and belittling of liberal spokespeople, like Michael Moore, that is readily copied by students with their own on-campus targets.