That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. Next on booktv, amy binder takes an in depth look at experiences and activism of conservative students on the campuses of americas colleges and universities. This is about an hour and 15 minutes. Well, thank you very much for coming out on this rainy thursday. And thank you very much to christine and tulare for inviting me to the center. For more than half a century, conservative critics have been in think thanks, foundation and the media have championed the cause of conservative College Students who they say suffer on College Campuses. In books with such titles as freefall of the american university, and tenured radicals, critics charge the american Higher Education has become the place a liberal if not radical faculties, and that in the classrooms of the politicized university, middle of the road students complacently consume their professors misinformation. Moderate students are smug liberal students are smug and feeling that theyre on the righteous side of politics, and conserve students have to decide whether to endorse their professors high rates while they are voiced their outrage corroding the risk of sacrificing their grades. To mitigate the effects of the leftist campus, while the conservatives organizations have been put in place at David Horowitz has introduced the academic bill of rights to legally protect students from liberal orthodoxy while others like the Young Americas Foundation sponsor conferences that celebrity in the movement. The Clare Boothe Luce policy institute is targeted to College Women while intellectual organizations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute started by william f. Buckley, or the Federalist Society or the institute for humane studies at George Mason University provide internships and seminars for conservatives academics and future jurist. The list goes on with the support of foundations with many familiar names. All this movement to build a corporate young ideological, dependable lawyers, journalists, Congressional Staff and voters has been a central priority of the right. Very few social scientists have studied effort to mobilize the students or to examine just how these Students Experience the undergraduate lies. This has left us in an odd situation of not knowing if the accusations leveled against universities resonate with the students on whose behalf they are made. Nor do we know much of anything else about these students, such as when and how did they become conservative . What are the political turning point . Both before and during college. What are the issues they care about, and how do these differ from their elders, if they do . What do conservatives didnt know in the thought of all this, how do networks planned . We been more or less in the dark except for a few media reports about how students on the right enact their conservatism on campus, what kinds of speech and action do they use. And just how do conservatives speech and action ver vary from campus to campus, if at all . In the absence of good social science research, one could have a general sense that conservative College Students are fairly homogeneous bunch who more or less mimicked by the national gop does, but is it true . This is where my coauthor kate would and i can ge but i apologe for the extremely crowded slide on the board become interested in having you understand our conceptual framework, and we commend with her book becoming right which is a case study of two universities in choosing to study concerned students at a private university and western flagship Public University our idea was to to see if we get better person university might be understood uniquely shaped students politics. Sociologist and other social scientists have long been interested in universities affects on students political attitude, their behaviors, values of the bulk of this research known as political socialization or college effects Research Uses national our campus level data sets based on surveys to measure whether students change in their medical participation rates like voting, whether that increases or decreases because of college, or it measures college modified students political orientation one way or another. But by my estimation as important as this work is, its also a rather thin way of thinking about students political development. Or how to actually experience politics during their college years. Was a political socialization literature can do, wasnt designed to do other theoretically or methodologically is consider the multiple ways that College Campuses as interactional settings among lots of different people on campus which are made up of distinctive organizational features, housing, class size, student and faculty ratios as well as cultural understandings of who we are on this campus, as a campus community. How it is these a campus features might it mean to you in shape young peoples political ideas and actions. By using qualitative methods, in depth interviews, field work on these campuses and also at conferences and in conservatives organizations, we wanted to see if and how universities play a significant role in fundamentally constituting new political ideas and discovering new models for actions in ones conservative behavior. We been very fortunate are not alone in how we think College Campuses should be understood as generative systems of meaning rather than of repositories of previously formed individual level perspectives among students. So for those of you in and out of sociology education, i dont know if theyre any sociologist of education in the audience, but you wont be surprised when we position our study on the same bookshelves as several recently published works which show how universities act as hubs and incubators for particular types of students to flourish. So, for example, Elizabeth Armstrong and laura hamilton, although not studying political formation, to look at how a Public University in the midwest a setup to facilitate what they call a party pathway. Their party dorms comment very ample fraternity network and so forth, and this creates the identities of partiers at this university. Shamus con in in the seven book looks out at elite boarding schools manufacture in students particular models of selfconfidence and self deserving is as they move on to college. We are also informed that Older Workers as i indicated above in a particular i withdraw your attention to dimaggio endeavors studies about Higher Education in different ways. Charters unique identities and lifestyle possibilities. We are bringing politics into the mix. On the concerns of research into things, theres also very fortunately because we need to learn a lot more about the politics of the right in our polarized society as larry mentioned, theres a new body of work that focuses not only on christian or extremist conservatism or conservatism among women which is where most sociological attention to conservatism has been paid in the past i would argue, but also on fiscal conservatism, on the infrastructure of conservatism, the think tanks, foundations, universities, centrist and on the historical advent of antiestablishment or movement conservatism, including actual new projects on a tea party, i indicated fubs educational and conservative Research Projects on the slide but in the grand scheme what im talking about today as well as in the book is ringing these Research Streams together to look at a University Campuses and the days conservative politics intersects at how college shapes the nature, activities and fundamentally the formation of politically conservative self. Turning now for more conceptual framework, i want to say a few words about the case studies schools and our sample. As i started thinking about this project in the summer of 2007, i had a whole bunch of case studies, campuses i thought i might look at, as many as six at one time. That didnt prove feasible. I selected eastern elites and western public universities for comparison of on dimensions of both similarity and differences such as classic case study selection methodology designed to yield insight. In terms of similarities, both are secular institutions although eastern elite, whether religioureligious institution tt sounded but thats a long time ago. Those are research one universities being they grant ph. Ds and research is a primary focus of faculty and graduate students. And politically at least by reputation both at the schools are in the conservative spotlight as liberal bastions. So if you listen to conservative am radio we read the wall street journal editorial page, you might hear complaints about both of these universities. In terms of differences, one is private or public with all of the differences this distinction makes in a students life. They differ in their admissions selectivity is a eastern elite takes about one in every 11 applicants. Western public takes about one into. They also differ in size of faculty and students can eastern has 7000 graduates, 71, western public has about 25,000 students with a student to faculty ratio of 18 to one. They differ in both their organizational features that a mentioned earlier housing, dining, physical size of campus, percent of students in organizations, as well as in cultural features including what we might call their institutional ethos. Some eastern is one of the most prestigious institutions in Higher Education in the world. Wow western is known for its faculty research. Is also known to be a party school. Is a place where students know that they can enjoy a recreational atmosphere. To find interviews for the study i began with clubs and other groups that posted on the internet for both of these campuses. In 2008 just before and after the president ial election, i made this is before the emergence of the tea party, i interviewed leaders and members of each campuses College Republicans, Prolife Groups, conservative newspapers as well as conservative columnist for the mainstream newspapers on campus. Antiguncontrol groups, libertarians and so when. Mostly these were active conservatives on campus. They had a reputation for being conservative, but through a chain i was able to find some students who were more behind the scenes. This isnt totally about activist students on campus. I conducted 50 students and alumni interviews in all out and all of this is so committed by another 50 interviews for 100 total with National ConservativeOrganization Leaders with administrative and other folks. Demographically, on both campuses the students were as you might expect from reading pew research polls or looking at the General Social survey, most of the students were predominantly white. There were more men and women in our sample, and they were generally fairly religious. Ran the gamut from being very religious, either evangelical or catholic to kind of spiritual but not religious. And we had a few agnostics and atheists in the group as well but generally this is a fairly religious bunch. A majority on both campuses were middle to upper middle class but although eastern elite interviewees tended to come from families that were more highly educated and affluent than western families. That said though, our interviews interviews displayed various. We had a few students at western and eastern whose parents had graduated from college, one or two whose parents had only graduated from high school, and advanced degrees as well. In the final analysis, the two samples were not as different on social class background as one might think and studying very elite private university and a Public University. So with all of the youngest let me now get your findings in the book. Ill focus on the issues i raised earlier about the presumed homogeneity of conservative College Students across the country and that will do this in particular by drilling down on students political styles on these two case studies campuses. When i talk about styles are not talking just about students and alums stated ideological beliefs or the doctrines that they addicted but also their expressive practices in the service of those beliefs. And i do this because in the increasingly polarized National Environment and even within the Republican Party itself, we are seeing that the styles of politics is becoming, are becoming as important as the ideas of politics. Insofar as particular styles of animosity, gridlock, a lack of compromise. Ill open my discussion of conservative College Student styles with a couple of vignettes from our data. So it is 2007 and members of the College Republicans at western flagship had just stage an event called the affirmative action bake sale. I know this is no stranger to you at berkeley. The bake sale is a wellknown scene of political theater that content students use at many universities across the country selling cookies at a higher price to white students than they do to, say, africanamerican and latino students. The bake sale is set to highlight the insidious effects of racebased affirmative action. It has a point of view but when students at western talk about what its like to actually stage the event, its clear that revel in the shared fun and confrontation that the activity stirs a. One interviewees had we are out there and its like five College Republicans, and for about half an Hour Community members have come by and say im a white guy and ive got to pay a dollar. People are getting into it. This bake sale which is not from western, prices were inflated. People were getting into it. Of course, meanwhile, theres a noontime rally organized by the diversity thugs, by which means politically correct group like women or racial ethnic minorities. Theyve got their bullhorns out, theyre angry, they got the science and they have no problem with protesters but i want the protesters there. Another student said of the affirmative action bake sale and events like to come if you wake up in the morning and someone calls you a bigot, you know youre going to have a good day. This kind of event is one of a very large number of actions that conservative students stage on College Campuses alongside catch an illegal alien day where one statistic designated document or illegal and others try to catch them. The Global Warming beach party where students mock the theory of Climate Change with beer and suntan oil. And the conservative coming out day, a twist on lgbt celebrati celebration. And such events are promoted by National Conservative organizations which spends millions a year helping conservatives learned the activists in what we are calling provocative style. Meanwhile, 2000 miles away at eastern elite, an event like the bake sale is considered not so much even by administrators and faculty who dont like them. But more so by conservative students themselves. At this private university, concerted undergraduates denounce confrontational actions just for the sake of pushing the buttons. As one student described it, look, i dont think anything like that is helpful. One person walks up and realize this is an affirmative action bake so and then walked away thinking, wow, that was a great illustration of the problems with affirmative action. The only thing ive ever seen coming from putting on an event like that is lack of communication at others concurs saying it would be unsuitable for their campus. Even while they are also ideologically antiaffirmative action. Instead of provoking, they prefer to use what we call civilized discourse with which they attempt to engage liberals liberals and discussion of the art about ideas, research, not good timing of both sides or least thats the stated intent. We found that these two styles pretty much are mutually exclusive. The provocative style almost never gets used at eastern, and when it does student groups were not to use it again. One interviewee at eastern elite set our member freshman year our posters would be like, life starts at conception and ends at planned parenthood. We would have blood splatters, or we would have a fetus developindevelopin g, an and the fees we be seeing Different Things like i want to be an Airline Pilot when i grow. Those like crazy. People hated him, i learned from that experience. The students go on to say that his Prolife Group started different kinds of campaigns in light of this failure. For baby bottles, pregnancy counseling and to work across the ill what he referred to as the sometimes crazy women center on campus. In other words, his provise grip, many members had use tactics like this when they were growing up, didnt like the controversy they were stirring up at eastern elite unlike at western what that was a much the point. At eastern students for the civilized discourse topics appropriate for their campus. At western, meanwhile, students told us they shunned this more respectful style because quite frankly its not conservative enough and it is lame. So these two styles that dont meet on these two campuses. However, theres more to this story. While each of these is the dominant form of expression, we found there are also two subordinate or submerged styles used by conservative students. No one style is completely monolithic on either campus. On both campuses a smaller set of students say they were happy to engage in campaigning style, hosting candidates as speakers, walking precincts and that sort of thing. But this campaigning style comes under attack from other conservatives on both campuses are at first its not used very much at all at western and when it is used it captures a lot of flak for being an abomination because it kisses the aspect of the national gop. It is not fun enough. At eastern to me will, the campaigns to consider similar assault but with more of an elitist flavor. Wasted says he is baffled as to what any of his highly touted classmates would want to come to school like eastern and then spend the time working at phone banks, for heaven sakes. It seems so plebeian, overpriced collectivities. We can see even when students are rejecting a style, theres a unique campus meaning system behind it. Finallyit. Finally, there are those adhesion to make use of our last category of conservative styles which we called the high repetition style. Replications stop. Its a review style consisting of ironic, sometimes philosophical and contemptuous essays about multiculturalism or gender sensitivity. These issues that come under attack are not so different from what western public conservatives dislike but the expression is very different. Provocation is not activists were activism means going out on the quad and publicly riling people up with catch an illegal alien day. The other style is a literary arts style, think Dinesh Dsouza in his review days. So just to summarize a set of findings very quickly, at western public the provocative style is dominant, confrontational, seeks fun and campaigning style its not seeing to be appropriate for funloving College Students who are conservatives. At eastern elite, meanwhile, civilized discourse predominates and both campaigning and the style is subordinate. What do we make of this uneven distribution . Should we even be surprised by these findings . Perhaps this is all just a matter of selection affect. So explanation complete whereby eastern elite students are simply more refined to begin with as they walked onto campus, and the simplest discourse style just make sense to them. While at western conservatives come to campus ready to rumble. Its a good hypothesis given the length of my presentation today, while we do see the impact of selection coming it cannot give us a complete understanding of what we are seeing on the campuses. For one thing demographic about eastern elite students as a mentioned earlier do tend to come from them some more affluent and have more education in the background, which may be the origin of greater civility toward others, the students and alumni we interviewed at eastern were hardly all that school early on in gracious cosmopolitanism. Indeed, many said they learned in many aspects of their lives once they arrived at school. In addition like their peers at western, eastern students have done things like staged abortion protests and watched fox news and they visited the websites of National Conservative organizations that sponsor the provocative style, and yet we didnt see these two students bringing in to this style as the western students did. Second in terms of wide we reached these times can when we look at students conservative ideologies or beliefs, we found the students on the two campuses were really quite similar in several ways. And i can go into a little more detail about this in q. And a. , but students at both eastern and western agree about the need for small government. They agree about the problems of the nanny state. They are advocating for Strong National security, and even on social issues. They are more or less in agreement. So wouldnt be unreasonable to expect that similarities and ideology would lead to similarities in style, but they dont. Another way these differences are surprising is that the styles dont correspond to students statements, feeling like theyre in the political minority. On their respective campuses. Interviewees on both campuses said quickly to being in the numerical minority introduces real hardships for them. Isolation from peers, feeling like youre always having to defend their political issues, and also feeling like the politics are at odds with faculties politics. Yet this by this similar and say theyre in the minority, the styles of the two groups are certainly different. And, finally, a fourth reason are finding are intriguing, if i do say so myself it is that for the past couple decades at least, it is debate whether this originated with the tea party or much earlier with Newt Gingrich or reagan or for the back, but theres clearly been a narrowing of conservatives stop the motor by the national Republican Party. What we might call slash and burn tactics pics of the fact that a provocative style is in the cultural error for conservatives at the broadest level of society and politics, theres typically only western of asian students require explanation. So what is the story . Im going to move through know a bit more data again before offering our cultural and organizational analysis of a universities matter for the development of students conservative styles. Interviewees at western give us a variety of reasons for why they chose to be confrontational. Virtually all of them said that confronting liberals is essential for dealing with a sense of marginalization, that they feel on the campus. They prefer the faculty transgressions that alienate them, such as being singled out as a conservative growth who should offer the conservative perspective on some topic in class. They talk about their peers behavior, not listen to them or harassing their speakers. And they point to the overall label field in the community or flagship is located. All of this gives a confrontational style legitimacy in the eyes, they have to fight back. Interviewees also said the provocative style is about having fun, a kind of playing gotcha with liberals. As one student says, angry liberals tend to be conservative activists bread and butter. I mean, College Republicans will do a silly, stupid stuff often very purposefully to get peoples emotions to come out. The ideas here is that if they pushed liberals buttons and the liberals then fly off the handle and respond angrily, this just is a fundamentally biased liberal faculty peers are in first place and is just extremely gratifying to see everybodys truth stripes. If cspan werent filming this i would tell you about a gender studies professor at the university of iowa they took exception to College Republicans conservatives coming out and drop the fbomb in an email back to College Republicans. You can see her as being kind of exhibit a for precise with the College Republicans on that campus were up to. They wanted to push buttons, have liberals speak out against them and then they could point to the faculty as being the problem. Now, this interview wee is knowingly being p hyper bolick when he refers to his evil socialist campus, but hes also serious about the positive effect such rhetoric can have for him later. Students have an eye on their future careers, and at western if you want to get into politics, which many of these students do, students perceive a confrontational style to be a poop for their career paths. Boon for their career paths. How does western Public University culturally and institutionally incubate these students taste for provocation, assuming they didnt just come to campus ready to go after liberals. The first thing thats important to note is that western is a Large State School where only about 25 of students live on campus, and only a handful of eating plans and dining halls. Altogether about 75 of students commute. Now, what we though from the literature about these kinds of Living Patterns is that college, and colleges students will cluster with people who are most like them off campus. Theres a strong pull toward similarity. And if there are not university interventions in the form of political organizations or town halls or things of that sort, this multiplies. And what this means for conservatives at western is that there are few opportunities for students of unlike mind to get to know one another. This organizational feature of campus, its size and its housing, contributes to real and perceived insularity from the other side of the political fence. It also, we found, leads to a weak set of Community Norms for respectful political discussions, and in turn there are fewer social constraints on provoking their peers and faculty. After all, if you dont know any black students or any latino students by name, its easier to set up a sign selling cookies to them for 25 cents or suggesting that theyre illegal aliens. So our first argument is that the atomizing housing and dining features and other kind of social features lead to thinner opportunities for Building Social capital across heterogenous lines, and this contributes to being provocative. Second or confrontational. Second, students at western have much less personal contact with faculty than, say, eastern students do. Theres a much larger studenttofaculty ratio at western, second, students take their classes in mostly large lecture format. And, third and not importantly although you mute not think about it off the top of your head theres an impersonal lottery Registration System for getting into courses in the first place. And i was surprised to hear in the interviews that i conducted how much this was talked about. But what i figured out was what it means is students often arent getting into the classes that they do want, and they end up in classes that they dont, and while this depersonalized system presumably has alienating effects on all students at western, it certainly does at ucsd, liberal moderate conservatives, for students on the right who have already been primed by National Conservative organizations to regard their professors with mistrust, it increases their level of suspicion about faculty. And, again, it lowers the barriers to more aggressive confrontation. You dont know your professors, its easier to careicture them as socialists. Finally, the culture or westerns organizational sag da played a major role in how students understand themselves even in the political realm. Western is a party school. If you look at u. S. News world report, you see recreation being emphasized, and we argue in our book that the prosock ty style of conservativism actually fits very well with students understanding of their campus as a fun place to be, where College Students are supposed to have fun. We dont want to play it safe while were here. Theres a sense among western conservatives that college is a time when they should play it big and set traps for liberals which they think makes their conservative points work better on their campus. So for organizational and cultural reasons, we argue provocation fits well as a style for conservatives at western. Even while they share much the same ideological tenets as their peers at eastern. Okay, so whats the story at eastern . Why is it important to conservative students there to present their ideas in a selfproclaimed similarrized way and to appear respectful to peers and professors . And to answer in this question, im going to refer just one, to one more point because its quite telling. An Eastern College republican said whereas a lot of the republican whereas a lot of the republican message on other campuses is structured around these big, eyegrabbing, attentiongetting things because you have 60,000 students on campus who are more interested in the fraternity party, at eastern the way that you get to students is much different, because people are willing to go to a discussion seminar with an eminent academic. You dont have to be out on the quad protesting in order to get peoples attention. And one can see very clearly in this quote that eastern students are aware of what other College Students are doing on their campuses. And what the student is saying is that hap thats finish hannahs class mates are free not to pursue such populist ends. The student im quoting was at the very moment of our interview a special assistant to one of george w. Bushs chief political strategists. He was taking the semester off to work with the strategist who is no stranger to confrontation. Youll just have to take my word on that, because i cant say his name in this presentation. But while this student was working for this strategist and leaned into more confrontational style for national politics, when he was on campus, he argued that provocation wouldnt work there. And one overarching rag neal eclipse rationale egypt r clipsed all others, and they said we engage at respectful exchange at eastern because, dot, dot, dot, this is eastern. We are part of a special, elite community made up of world class faculty and highly talented class mates. Theyre important now, theyre important later. And we have the luxury and privilege of being responsible people in this context. Also interesting, though, is that eastern interviewees said this was also felt to be an obligation. Theyre compelled to engage in appropriate interaction. Compelled to not put on events that would make people on campus feel uncomfortable, and you can think of the blood spatters on the prolife posters i mentioned earlier which were immediately jettisoned. Discomfort isnt good. Being at ease is good. And students discussion of the ease that schools teach their students to exhibit and embody, so most students do not come to campus already perfectly educated in refinement. They learn to be civil once they get to campus with one another in their conservativism. Theyre taking on Something Like a collective eminence by being students at eastern. I should also add that students at eastern have a fixed eye on their future careers. But unlike students at western, eastern students are are convinced that for the types of futures theyll be having applying for fulbrights, seeking clerkships, heading off to mackenzie or Goldman Sachs heading up a bake sale isnt going to look so good on their resumes, and theyre very aware of this while theyre in college. So clearly, theres an institutional ethos at eastern of being if in a special Academic Community that shapes conservatives styles. But we see this cultural ethos being bolstered by the organizational features of campus as well. First, the housing system at eastern keeps students on campus all four years and in well known clusters. They live with one another for many years. The campus overall is much smaller than at western which means that people know each other at least minimally by face. They feel more accountable to one another. And student ises eat communeally, and dining halls all four years. And the way the students describe this is that they live in an eastern elite bubble, a very selfcontained social scene. Which we argue lodge lates modulates the feeling to go rogue. So i could go on about class size, registration procedures that are much more tailored to the individual student and other academic features like students more personal relationships with faculty, but you probably get the picture that organizationally eastern looks different than western. And that as a consequence of all of these cull curl meanings and organization cultural meanings, eastern conservative students even while they say they suffer from marginalization still feel that theyre part of the universitys deep and manufactured community. Such a sense of Community Rules out, for most conservatives, the activist provocative style. Despite it being a style thats been vigorously promoted in go to p politics and used gop politics and used on other campuses. I want to emphasize that students at western and eastern from their selfreports were more similar in their styles at the time that they entered college than at the time that we interviewed them two, three, four and more years in. Many before entering college had written conservative blogs, theyd certainly read them, theyd attended protests, they had debated politics with their families, they had staged events in high school and so on. Its also important to note again, while eastern students were more likely in the aggregate to have upper middle class backgrounds which might translate to a taws for a more civil taste for a more civil discourse style, interviewees at both schools came from families of varying fef and cultural patterns. So were arguing against the position that were similarly seeing precollege habits. And were arguing that campuses create pathways to particular kinds of conservativism. This is important in a couple of ways. For one, the project helps us understand more about the lives of these students, how they think about themselves and how they conduct their activities. And also about the variety of styles and dispositions among conservative students which we wouldnt know with more generalized media accounts or from critiques emanating from conservative organizations. Second, the project also helps us understand more about how College Campuses act as incubators for certain kinds of political styles and not others. Clearly, that point thus far. Political styles are not just a reflection of individual choices, but are developed through shared culture in interaction with others in local settings as well as many dialogue with broader as in dialogue with broader cultural politics and styles. We also learned from this research that political mobilization is closely connected to the longterm professional projects that these students envision themselves having, the jobs they want, where they see themselves in ten years. And although i wasnt able to talk about this at length in todays discussion, these professional projects are highly contingent on the particular campus one goes to. Particularly in thinking about ones role in national or regional politics. And politics, careers, universities, styles discourses, all of these have to be studied part and par cell with one parcel with one another if an individual context. The project gives us insight into conservative politics at large where the provocative style certainly has gotten a lot of play and leverage in todays Republican Party apparatus. That sounds like such an understatement really. Ideology, not style, has long been the Research Focus of people studying conservativism. Certainly in the last couple of years in the wake of the tea party, more writers and commentators have clued into this, but at the time that kate and i were conducting our work, there was a lot more attention to content than there was to form. But form shouldnt be overlooked. In todays world where polarizing politics have been the currency, its a grave mistake to ignore style. And we would argue its as serious to ignore one of the key studies where political styles are fostered, College Campuses. So with that, ill end, and thank you so much for your attention. [applause] shall i sit . Thank you very much. No, i think you stay here. Okay. Is that right . And well have questions from the audience, please. Yes, thank you very much. On campus here i attended maybe three Federalist Society presentations at the law school, which is kind of an odd combination. I mean, theyre the minority, but also its kind of elitist even though its Public Service and it kind of stands out from the general crowd, so im not sure what the how the venue, thousand arrange the venue there. But they always not always, but more often than other than groups in the law school who organize presentations and there are quite a few, there are maybe eight or ten during the week, they always stage it as a debate. With uhhuh. And they always give and the invitee is not always a super conservative, theyre just someone who might offer grist for the conservative mill, and then theyll purposely have a liberal, you know, a standin liberal respond. And so its kind of crosses the boundary, the debate makes it confrontational potentially, but people are very often on their best behavior and [inaudible] so its kind of a mucksture of all that mixture of all that. I just wanted to ask a second and last question. Are we talking about undergraduates and not graduates . Yes. Because its a research university, so, you know, the graduates are off someplace else or whats going on with them . Thanks. Right, thank you. Well, to your point about Federalist Society first, if i may, i would say what the Federalist Society is engaging in is civilized discuss course. And in civilized discourse as we describe it in the book, theres a lot of interest in engaging others in debate and having, you know, fantastic conversations about ones positions. Its just that theres not an ad hominem quality to it. So the Federalist Society is one of those intellectual organizations that i named early on which has done a lot of work mobilizing conservative jurists and law students and so forth. So i would say that fits extremely well as the civilized discourse style. And, you know, the hall is a very elite university, so it makes sense that that would university and law school, so it makes sense that that would take place there, i would say. Your second question about graduate students, we had in our mix both undergrads we focused on undergraduates because so much of the conservative critique is about undergraduates. So i really at the point that i was collecting data and doing the research, it was really only i who was there. Kate wood came on later, so when i refer to i, i dont mean to be narcissistic, just accurate. Or so i really wanted to focus on precisely the group that the conservative critics and that journalists frequently talked about. And we didnt get a whole lot of information about graduate students. Among our alumni there were several who were in law school at the time, but i wouldnt be able to really speak to patterns among graduate students of these universities. Thanks. Someone else . Please. So fascinating discussion. Thank you. I would think it was more important if you could draw some conclusion about whether the style of the conservative actions on campus extended past campus and graduation. So do conservatives that come out of, you know, pop list western populist western universities, do they act differently after graduation in the political arena . Well, so i have not done that research. Ive not looked at kind of tracing who legislators or, you know, various others in public office, where theyve come from school. That would be a great project. The one thing that i do know about their futures is what they say about the kinds of jobs that they want to get later, right . So i said that job aspirations were a really important component to how these students were thinking about their politics op campus on campus. Be you were thinking that you would go into regional politics which is what a lot of the western students said that they were going to go into, in this kind of mud slinging and populist style they thought would be quite useful to them. Whereas at eastern what i found out was that most of these students were actually going into finance and consulting like so many other eastern students, liberal, moderate or otherwise. And there this, you know, this kind of civilized style would be quite useful, right . Theyre in various halls of power, theyre working with people who have different kinds of perspectives. So while i dont have data on what these guys are like once they get out into the larger society, i can kind of think about what they might be like based on what they were talking about in terms of their futures. In the green over here. Thank you. Really enjoyed your presentation. Oh, thank you. From i mean, i was also wopped or oring what are the longerterm implications of these different styles for the conservative movement. But i also wondered if you were able, i know its hard to interview everybody, but if you were able to see what the impacts of the context were on liberal groups on the same campus, and did you see sort of similar forms on both of the campuses . Yeah. And i think thats a really important question. This could be all well and good in talking about how conservatives respond to their campus, but is this just the organizational and cultural features that create everybody on campus . And again, i didnt collect data on that. I could hear from conservatives what they said about their liberal poors. My conjecture on this is that on both campuses these styles with exception of probably the highbrow provocation style at eastern which is this literary arch style that we would see much the same styles for liberal students as well. Because these organizational features and the kind of cultural ethos is so strong at these two schools. However, liberal students dont i would guess that liberal students might not think about the purpose of their styles as much. So at western public these students really thought about what it meant to be confrontational. I really have to do this because im in the minority. I have to do this so that people recognize that im here, dammit. I have to do this so that not everybody thinks that only liberals go here. And liberal students dont have that same sense of their place on campus. Equally at eastern, i would say that students there, liberal students there dont have to kind of play against type in the same way that conservative students do. That they also feel more comfortable on campus and that they are also kind of schooled in this collective eminence that we talk about. Yeah. Thanks for this really great discussion. I wish i had access to your book while i was writing my dissertation [laughter] it would be really useful. Im interested in your thoughts about sort of dovetails with what you were just talking about, this sort of victimization that is portrayed as being a numeric minority on campuses. If, in fact, the numeric minority is as accurate as would be put out, you know, im not sure about that. Uhhuh. So how does this jiujitsu happen that a people who are, perhaps, affiliated with some of the most powerful institutions and families and lineages are becoming victimized on campuses . Im sort of interested in your thoughts about how that happens. Right. I will do a quid pro quo, and ill ask you about your dissertation after i answer this question. So in truth of what are the numbers of students on campus just to get those kinds of facts out, we use survey data from the Higher EducationResearch Institute to look at patterns across time this combination with in combination with our own interviews and field work. And we found that over time the percentage of both liberals and conservatives, you know, hover around 20 , or at least thats where we end up today. Now, on this is very interesting, actually. On campuses like eastern elite, the number of conservatives is, again, at about 20 . But relative to liberals, theyre way outnumbered. About 50 of students on elite private universities like this one consider themselves liberal, and a smaller number consider themselves moderate. Whereas at a University Like public, the moderates and liberals are reversed. So there are actually about the same number of liberals and the same number of conservatives. And the vast majority or not the vast majority, but about 50 of students on campus are moderatement moderate. So out of this, you know, theres argument that they are in the numeric minority. Theyre really, at least at western public where people confrontationally present themselves, they are about equal with liberal. And i think that victimization ive actually talked with a few conservative critics who are also concerned about this victimization stance. But that is what so much of the National Civil discourse is really made up of. And you can see that its really a mobilizing technique, right . You need us. Come to our conferences. Read our stuff. Do the kinds of projects that are fun to do. Get in peoples faces. Use the activist mentality. So its just a much more inviting kind of stance. Less so the eastern elite students turn their backs a little bit on the victimization because a profile, because they just didnt think it was very becoming for people like them on their campus. They would much rather think of themselves as also being highly honored, respected and so forth. Do people who are fiscal conservatives and liberal, social liberals, do they identify as moderates, conservatives . What in how is is there that kind of breakdown . Right. So i dont know in the national sample. They cant disaggregate those two, or they cant disentangle what people actually mean in their issues. But we talked with students who also were on the more libertarian side on social issues and on fiscal policy. And they, they pretty neatly fit into these categories. There wasnt a big difference in terms of adopting the styles on campus that their peers had adopted. Does that answer your, that question in. No, but it sounds like there isnt data right, right. So in the National Surveys they dont its a very kind of crude measurement. How do you see yourself. Very liberal, liberal, middle of the road, conservative or very conservative. And they havent asked conservative students in National Surveys about distinctions. I saw a hand up here or [inaudible] yeah. I find it interesting that you point out that these conservative students who are at least a minority on the campuses that you describe engage in selfvictimization when thats something that conservatives constantly accuse people of color as engaging in. So i just thought that was interesting. May i Say Something about that . Certainly. Just off the bat . It is, indeed, ironic. Its also true that, well, maybe thats not needed. But this is what some of the conservative, some reflective conservatives are thinking about. Like, we engage in this discourse of other peoples victimization, and yet we make so much hay out of victimization. And what the National Organizations are really doing is using that rhetoric, can to can on thing that rhetoric coopting that rhetoric and, you know, clearly stating that this has been wrong the whole time, that people who are really in the minority are conservatives. So in other words, white males really got a raw deal in america. [laughter] right. Right. Well, and on campus i havent, i didnt use this quote, but there is a quote from one of the people who put on an earlier affirmativeback at western. And western has 85 whites on campus. There arent a whole lot of minority students on this campus. Theyre underrepresented. Students on this campus. And he said, you know, you come to campus, and if youre black, you can join the africanamerican club, and you have other people who are there for you, but if youre a christian, white, conservative male, youre in this on your own. And that, i mean, that is his feeling on his campus. So in this adoption of this discourse is quite profound. And he believes it. This is not, this, to my understanding of this interviewee as i was talking with him, it was not a let me sell the interviewer on this particular kind of political argument. This is i feel like on my campus. Potential black student recruits from l. A. As crack dealers. And, of course, the College Republicans brought the rightwinger David Horowitz to campus at least twice. The first time i confronted him and sent him running with questions, demolishes whole theory in which i also subsequently had a commentary in the San Francisco chronicle which took on his argument about reparations. Under the name Joseph Anderson in december t cisco chronicle. The second time he came here, he talked about concerned students trying to push buttons. The second time he came after i felt like i had already dealt with him the first time quite adequately, i told, in a public media, online media, i told the progress of students just ignore him. Make it a nonevent which actually happened and he expressed disappointment that there werent any liberals and conservatives their pixel otherwise would if the situation on the quads when im not writing formally, back in the day a little, my tactic was not to take this sort of westernstyle conservatives intellectually seriously in fact i would take their side and parody them against my progressive colleague, comrades, whatever you want to say and that really fosters the conservative movement. My question for you is, if i could make like three very brief ones and you can answer them equally brief, one, this sort of catch an illegal alien day, that to me sounds pretty explicitly racist as opposed to like a bake sale where some people might want to indirectly say is racist, i dont know. So im wondering if that particular school have been speech codes about racist speech . The other question is, i havent seen them in a long time. And my final question is, does this ultimately boil down to like, you know, to borrow and modify public enemy . Does this boil down to fear of a black and brown planet . At least universities that ive been out for his times, most on the coast but one in the midwest, its incredibly brown even when its asian, you know . So does this boil down to, this is not my Parents University anymore. You know, all these people with all their cultures that they identify with and celebrate, this is really threatening me as sort of a generic anglo white male discussion. Thank you very much. Let me start with the first one. The last one first. And it sounds like what you are saying is some of what is being said about the tea party, right . Theres too much change thats happening. We have a black president. We have all of these undeserving people around, and we want to take our country back, right . And im not sure that i really see that on these campuses. These campuses are predominantly white. Neither one is in california, ill just tell you that. So theres not this kind of multicultural experience that we get any universities in the california system. So its not my sense that its just racial, politics or that its for most racial. They really hate gender sensitivity. They really are concerned about National Security and islamism. They really despise, so it seems like its a more general kind of choosing hot button issues that can get on the western public campus, issues that can get people excited but those arent your only issues, get an illegal alien day and from the action. Dinesh dsouza, working backwards i believe is leading in account of la jolla, california, the absurdity was in neighborhood of ucd san diego but im not 100 sure of that and i havent met with him. In the book in a section where i needed to fully give a flavor of the highbrow publications out i couldnt quote directly from our interviewees, from the concert newspapers because anybody with google could take it in and figure out which campus i was talking about. So i used a description that dinesh this is a provider of his own earlier coming of age publications which he didnt call that. And is just like a dead ringer for what the students adopted the style were doing. Catch an illegal alien day, and speech code, its really interesting to talk with conservatives about what happens when they stage these kind of events because this is where the real victimization of course comes up again. So when they stage an affirmative action bake sale our catch an illegal alien day what they say is security comes out to protect the protesters, right . Theyre not protecting us. Our cash registers are being flipped over and money is flying and people are hurling insults at those. But what the administration does is protects the other side. So in fact there are norms are round speech, speech codes i believe at this university. And these guys see that as a real problem. Does that capture what you were getting at . I guess im wondering is, why did the university come down on something seems like pretty explicitly racist speech where i wouldnt even call a bake sale racist per se, but you know. Unless they had catch a slavery cupcakes or something, that would be pretty i guess im wondering where was the university, the chancellor, the vice chancellor on that kind of explicit racist im trying to remember the details of the last big event of catch an illegal alien day, at nyu, so not at a Public University. And much ink was spilled and there was a lot of controversy around it, but i dont believe that the university shut it down. I think that it just kind of played out naturally. But i could be wrong on that point. My question is on something in your presentation. How does religion and Sexual Orientation affect the different . Im wondering if you talk to different socalled diversity clubs or programs on both different campuses and how activities affect different political styles of different students . So, we come in much the same way that we didnt find major differences in adoption among students who were more fiscally conservative are socially conservative, we did see that religious students and nonreligious students on each campus more or less adopted similar styles, they fell into the style that was typical of their campus. Where we did find differences were among women. This is in part because we studied women more carefully. We wrote a whole chapter on what we called conservative femininity. We were doing these interviews around the time, if i may just alter your question all of it, we were doing these interviews along the time that sarah palin have been brought on the ticket so there was a lot of conversation about what it meant to be a conservative woman. And we were really interested to come to understand that to be a conservative woman, is to be feminine and despise liberal feminism, of course, because they saw liberal feminism as narrowing the opportunities for women and directing them more towards arrears than towards careers than they would all like to be. Be. There are plenty the career women but they saw liberal feminism as closing off opportunities to choose other kinds of women endeavors. And they also saw liberal feminism as shutting down the opportunity to embrace a real femininity. So we found that quite interesting, but if these were, that was the only population that we studied in isolation. [inaudible] well, the women loved her. This is true at eastern elite and that western. They didnt love her entirely. They realized that she was a flawed candidate, and they didnt like that she lost and they didnt like that she couldnt say more, you know, more profound things about russia and things like that but they did really find her outside of the old boys network. They liked it that she brought his femininity to the floor brought his femininity to the floor, and they voted for her. Spent this is the last question. All of the people you interviewed activists or get some of them talk about becoming activists as result of being in the minority . Yeah. So we found both. We found there was quite a wide range of students in the college habits as i referred to them. Some of them have been active in protests, and one of them had staged a fake bill oreilly debate with a friend of his in high school. And so several of them came onto campus with activism in and. So, for example, the Prolife Group when they staged the action that featured the fetuses and so forth come the students had been active and they came on campus, tried that and realize stomach some of them had not been very active. Some of them ha have not been vy active because they had come from conservative communities and they never had to think about their conservatism. It was only once they got to the liberal university that they needed to express themselves. A brief followup on the sarah palin statement. At eastern, why do they love her print shes said shes pretty bombastic. I asked everything one of my interviewees about her. The men didnt like her as much and they saw her as can when they voted for mccain in reporting for a ticket that contain sarah palin and that was to bed. But with women, resonated with her being that model for what its like to be a conservative woman after having it all, a family, a career, success and so forth. And not all of them agreed with the way she conducted herself and the way, sorting the way she talked about the issues, but they did resonate with her. The facts of sarah palin. Okay, one more. Would any students were initially conservative influenced by the liberal and violent . Yeah. So thats another good question. We found that most of the students came in any of themselves as kind of generically republican or conservative, although there were a few who it move towards greater conservatism. But we also found that in college, students further refine how they referred to themselves as construed as. The people who had initially defined as republican or conservative then became fiscal conservative or catholic conservative. And one of our interviewees, i think if one person in particular refers to result as a crunchy conservative. So she is very prolife but shes proenvironment. Shes prosocial justice and some of the ways. So things get, get messier i guess would be what you call it. Well come please join me in thanking amy binder for this wonderful presentation. Thank you. [applause] we would like to hear from you. Tweet us your feedback, twitter. Com booktv. Booktv recently interviewed georgetown University Law professor Randy Barnett about his book restoring the lost constitution in which he argues that for many decades u. S. Courts have failed to uphold the parts of the constitution to protect our li