Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Becoming Right 201

CSPAN2 Book Discussion On Becoming Right March 1, 2014

During the election as this young preacher from georgia which is dr. Martin luther king jr. Who sort of leads the masses of africanamericans from racial to presentation. So in this notion that a rosa sat and, you know, martin could do this stuff and jesse could run and then barack could fly, all these things, they sound good, but they really simply few a much more complicated history. And that complicated history really involves so many africanamericans, women and men, who proactively dismantled racial segregation including rosa parks. Rosa parks was an activist. She didnt just refuse to give up her seat by accident, it was a concerted, strategic effort to try to transform democratic institutions. Tufts University History professor and author of dark days, bright nights, peniel joseph, specializes in the sub field of africana. His latest, stokely a life, will be in bookstores march 4th. Sunday hell take your questions in depth live for three hours starting at noon eastern on cspan2s booktv. Next on booktv, amy binder takes an indepth look at the 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 to larry for unviolating me to the center inviting me to the center. For more than half a century, conservative critics housing in think tanks, foundations and the media have championed the cause of conservative College Students who they say suffer on College Campuses. In books with such titles as free fall of the American University and tenured radicals, critics charge that american Higher Education has become the playpen of liberal, if not radical faculty, and that in the classrooms of the university, middle of road students consume their professors misinformation. Liberal students are smug and feeling that theyre on the righteous side of politics, and conservative students have to to decide whether to endure their professors tirades quietly or voice their outrage, running the rusk of sacrificing their grades risk of sacrificing their grades. Now, to mitigate the effects of the leftist campus, organizations have been put in place. David horowitz, for instance, has introduced the academic bill of rights to legally protect students from liberal orthodoxy while others like the Young Americas Foundation sponsor conferences that introduce thousands of student on the right to celebrities 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 institution for humane studies at George Mason University provide internships and seminars for budding conservative academics and future jurists, and the list goes on with the support of foundations with many familiar names. While this movement to build a core of young ideological, dependable lawyers, journalists, Congressional Staff and voters has been a central priority of right, very few social scientists have studied the effort to mobilize these students or to examine just how these Students Experience their undergraduate lives in the first place. And this has left us in the odd situation of not knowing if the accusations leveled against universities resonate with the students on whose behalf theyre made, nor do we know much of anything else about these students, sup as when and how such as when and how do they become conservative, what are their political turning points before end during college . What are the issues that they care about, and how do these differ from their elders be they do . Who do conservative students know in the world of thought and poll the ticks, how are tear networks formed, and weve been more or less in the dark about how students on the right actually enact hair conservativism on campus, what kinds of speech and action do they use, from what repertory do they select . And just how does conservative speech and action vary from campus to campus, if at all . In the absence of good social Science Research on these questions, one could have a general sense that conservative College Students are a fatherly homogeneous fairly homogeneous bunch, but is it true . And this is where my coauthor, kate wood, and i come in. I apologize for the, treatmently crowded slide on extremely crowded slide on board. And we come in with our book becoming right which is a comparative case study of two universities. In choosing to study students at eastern elite private university and western flagship Public University, our idea was to see if we could get better purchase on how universities might be understood to uniquely shape students politics. Sociologists and other social scientists have long been interested in universities effects on students political attitudes, their behaviors, their values, but the bulk of this research known as college effects Research Uses national or campuslevel draw that sets based deny data sets based on surveys to measure whether students change in their participation rates like voting, whether that increases or decreases because of college. It measures if college modifies students political orientations one withdraw or another from conservative to liberal, say, but by my estimation as important as this work is, its also a rather thin way of thinking about students political development. Or how they actually experience politics during their college years. What the political socialization literature cant do, it wasnt designed to do it either theoretically or med logically, 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, studenttofaculty ratios as well as cultural understandings of who we are on this campus as a campus community. How it is that these campus features might give meaning to and shape young peoples political ideas and actions. So by using qualitative measures, in particular indepth interviews, also field work op these campuses and also at conferences and in conservative organizations, we wanted to see if and how universities play a significant role in fundamentally constituting new political ideas and discovering new models for action in ones conservative behavior. Now, kate and i very fortunately arent alone in how we think College Campuses should be understood as generaltive systems of meaning rather than repositories of previouslyformed individual perspectives among students. So for those of you in the know about sociology education, i dont know if there are sociologists of education in the audience, but you wont be surprised to learn that we position our study on the same book shelf as several recently published works which show how universities act as hubs and incubators for particular types of students to flourish. Elizabeth armstrong and laura hamilton, although theyre not studying in political formation, do look at how a Public University in the midwest is set up to facilitate what they call a party pathway. They have party dorms, they have very ample fraternity network and so forth, and this creates the identities of partiers at this university. Seamus khan and [inaudible] fernandez in separate books look at how elite boarding schools manufacture in students particular models of selfconfidence and of selfdeservingness as they move on to college. And were also informed by older work, as ive indicated above. And in particular, ill draw your attention to meyer in their various studies about Higher Education this different ways in different ways charter unique identities and lifestyle possibilities. And were bringing politics to to the mix. Now, on the conservative research end of things, this is also very fortunately because we really need to learn a lot more about the politics of right and our polarized society as larry mentioned theres a new body of work that focuses not only on christian or extremist conservativism or conservativism among women which is where most sociological attention has been paid in the past i would argue, but also on fiscal conservativism, on the infrastructure of conservativism, the think tanks, the foundations, the university centers. And on the historical add vebt of anti advent of antiestablishment or Movement Conservativism including excellent new projects on the tea party. And ive indicated a few of these educational conservative Research Projects on the slide, but in the grand scheme what im talking about today as well as in the book is wringing these Research Streams together to look at how University Campuses is todays conservative politics intersect and how college shapes the nature, the activities and fundamentally the formation of politically conservative cells. So turning now from our conceptual framework to our data, i want to say a few words about our case study schools and our sample. Now, as i start ised thinking about this project i started thinking about this project in the summer of 2007, i had a whole bunch of case study campuses that i thought i might look at, six as many as suggestion at one time. That didnt prove feasible. I selected eastern elite and western public universities for comparison along dimensions of both similarity and difference which is a classic case study selection methodology designed to gain insights, and i can tell you why theyve been given pseudonyms later in q a if anybodys interested. Now, in terms of similarities, eastern elite was a religious institution at its founding, but that was a long time ago. Both are Research One University ies meaning that they grant ph. D. S and politically at least by reputation both of these schools are in the conservative spotlight as liberal bastions. So if you listen to conservative am radio or you read the wall street journal editorial page, you might hear complaints about both of these universities amongst others. Now, in terms of differences, obviously, one is private, one is public with all of dumpses that this dis dunkses make. They differ in eastern elite taking about 1 in every 11 applicant, western public takes 1 in 2. They also differ in size and faculty of students, eastern has 7,000, western public has about 25,000 students with a studenttofaculty ratio of 18 to 1. And they differ in both their organizational features that i mentioned earlier, housing, dining, physical size of campus, percent of students in frats and organizations like that as well as in cultural features including what we might call their or institutional ethos. So eastern is one of the most prestigious institutions of Higher Education in the world while western is known for its facultys research, its also known to be a party school. Its a place where students know that they can enjoy a recreational atmosphere. Now, to find interviewees for the study, i began with clubs and other groups that posted on the internet for both of these campuses. So in 2008 just before and after the president ial election i note here this is before the emergence of the tea party i interviewed leaders and members of each Campus College republicans, Prolife Groups, columnists for the conservative newspapers as well as conservative columnists for the mainstream newspapers on campus, antigun control groups, libertarians and so on. So mostly these were active conservatives on campus. They had a reputation for being conservative, but through a chain referral methodology, i was also able to find some students who were more debehind the scenes. So this isnt totally about activist students on campus. I conducted 50 student and alumni interviews in all and supplemented by another 50 for 100 total with National Conservative organization leaders, with faculty administrators and other folks. Now 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 these students were predominantly white. There were more men than women many our sample, and they were generally fairly religious. In the ran the gam miss from being exam mutt for very religious to spiritual but not religious, and we had a few agnostics and atheists in the group as well. Generally, this is pairly religious bunch. And the majority of our interviewees were middle to upper middle class although eastern elites tended to come from families that were more highly educated and affluent than western families. That said though, our interviewees displayed quite extensive variants. 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. So in the final analysis, the two samples were not as different on social class background as one might think in studying an elite private university and a Public University. So let me now get to our findings in the book. And in this presentation ill focus on one of issues that i raised earlier about the presumed homogeneity of conservative College Students across the country. And ill do this in particular by drilling down on students political styles on these two case study campuses. And when i talk about styles, im not talking just about students andal lumbars stated ideological beliefs or the doctrines that they adhere to, but also their expressive practices in the service of those beliefs. And i do this because in our increasingly polarized National Political environment and even within the Republican Party itself, were seeing that the styles of politics is becoming, are becoming as important as the ideas of politics. Insofar as particular styles can lead to animosity, gridlock, a lack of compromise. And ill open my discussion of conservative College Students styles with a couple of vignettes from our data. So it is 2007, and is members of the College Republicans at western flagship have just staged an event called the affirmative action bake sale. I know this is no stranger to you at berkeleyment now, the bake sale is a well known piece of political theater that conservative 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 said 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 they revel in the sheer fun and confrontation that their activity stirs up. One interviewee said, so were out there, and its like five College Republicans. And for about half an Hour Community members would come by and say, oh, im a white guy, and ive got pay a dollar. People are really getting into it. At this bake sale, which is not from western, prices were inflated. People were really getting into it. Of course, peen while, theres a noontime rally organized by the diversity thugs, by which he means politicallycorrect groups like women or racial ethnic minorities. Theyve got hair bull horns out, theyre rang angry, theyve got their signs, and i have no problem with protesters, i want the protesters there. And another student said of events like it, be you wake up and come to school in the morning and someone calls you a bigot, you know youre going to have a good day. Now, this kind of event is one of a fairly large number of actions that conservative students stage on College Campuses alongside catching illegal alien day where one student is designated undocumented or illegal and others try to catch him, the Global Warming beach party where students talk the theory of Climate Change with beer and suntan oil x the conservativing comingout day, a twist on lgbt presence on campus. And such events are promoted by National Conservative organization which spend millions of dollars a year helping conservative students learn to be activists in what we are calling the provocative style. Meanwhile,2,000 miles away at eastern elite, an event like the bake sale is considered verboten, not so much even by administrators and faculty who dont like them, but more so by conservative students themselves. At this private university, conservative undergraduates denounce confrontational actions just for the sake of pushing liberals buttons. As one eastern student described it, look, i dont think anything like that is helpful. What person walks up to a table to buy a cupcake and realizes that this is an affirmative action bake sale and then walks away thinking, wow, that was a great illustration of the problems with affirmative action. The only thing ive ever seen from events like that is divisiveness and lack of communication. Others at eastern elite concur saying such an event would be unsuitable for the sensibility of their campus even while theyre also ideologically anti antiaffirmative action. Instead of provoking, they prefer to use what we call civilized discourse with which they attempt to engage liberals in discussions, they argue about ideas, sure, but with debate backed up by facts and research not through the flaming of both sides, or at least that thes the stated intent. We find that these two styles of conservativism pretty much are mu

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