Higher Education for American Democracy and the Channels of Student Activism

In Short

• An unintended consequence of Higher Education for American Democracy was to make colleges and universities a premier site in which disagreements over political ideology would play out in the public sphere.

• On today’s college campuses, progressive student activists are embedded in their school through a variety of institutional-level supports, from multicultural centers to the course curricula of social science and humanities departments.

• Conservative student activists increasingly rely on extramural support provided by a well-funded constellation of outside organizations critical of higher education.

Released in the wake of postwar concerns over European totalitarianism, Higher Education for American Democracy offered a blueprint for a more socially inclusive college experience—one that could help bolster informed and thoughtful civic participation throughout the nation. Much of the six-volume report commissioned by President Harry Truman proved prescient in transforming colleges and universities in the United States over the second half of the 20th century. However, there were also blind spots in the underlying analysis (e.g., downplaying the role of women). Additionally, federal policies and institutional adaptations enacted in response to the report resulted in unintended consequences. One such twist was that the massification of postsecondary learning did more than simply fortify civic values. Higher education also became a battleground over what democracy means and how an inclusive society should be governed.

In ways that would have been unimaginable in 1947—a time when very few Americans planned to continue their studies beyond the 12th grade—higher education has evolved into a focal point for contentious political action. As enrollments expanded and matriculation diversified in the decades following War World II, college campuses became key sites in which young people mobilized for left-leaning social change. The role of collegians in the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War highlight this reality. And, while the radical politics of faculty have often been exaggerated, many professors held beliefs far to the left of the general public (and indeed still do).

In response to the growing impact of the postsecondary sector and its association with progressive ideologies, the conservative movement embarked on a project to fashion an alternative intellectual infrastructure comprising foundations and think tanks. And while segments of this movement work to foster right-leaning thought within academia, much of the Republican Party today seems determined to roll back government spending for colleges and universities.

Taking the massification envisioned by Higher Education for American Democracy as the backdrop, we reveal how collegiate activism is shaped through two broadly opposing channels that steer students into divergent types of political mobilization and bring them into contact with different social and organizational networks. The progressive channel draws participants further inside their schools through a variety of institutional supports. The conservative channel, on the other hand, relies primarily on externally funded groups, often with an agenda critical of the mission of higher education. Within each main channel there are also eddies moving ideologically similar activists along somewhat different trajectories.

Our analysis relies primarily on semistructured interviews with 77 politically engaged college students conducted in the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018—that is, the first full school year after the election of President Donald Trump. All student respondents were enrolled at, or had recently graduated from, the University of Arizona, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, or the University of Virginia. These four publicly supported campuses are located in states considered toss-ups in presidential elections, upping the stakes for political activism. They are all flagship schools in their respective university systems. Students were selected based on their affiliations with campus-based political clubs, such as College Democrats, College Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom, Black Students Associations, socialist groups, and so on. Personal referrals were used to reach an even wider array of collegians, such as those who participate in transpartisan dialog groups and in university-sponsored multicultural centers.

Thinking about the institutions and groups behind the political clubs operating on campuses, as well as considering the practices that are encouraged or discouraged by them, better illuminate the organizational structures that make certain types of student activism more or less acceptable in different social contexts. Our work sheds new light on the implications of massification of postsecondary learning and the challenges faced by colleges and universities in times of extreme partisanship.

The Conservative Channel—Pulled Outside From the Right

Amanda and Ariel are two right-leaning students involved in the conservative channel for student activism. In many respects these two students have similar profiles. Both were raised in civically minded families who discussed politics around the dinner table. Each imagined making a career out of conservative activism. Both were highly involved in political clubs at their schools, and each benefitted from a number of options made available by national organizations assembled on the right.

Yet, while there are many things Amanda and Ariel had in common, important differences set the two women apart. First, their ideological orientations diverged in a key area: Amanda’s moderate viewpoint aligned with the dwindling anti-Trump faction of Republicans, putting her at odds with Ariel’s enthusiastic support of then-President Trump. Because of this, the two women gravitated to different political clubs on campus, which meant they also ended up connecting with very different organizations forming the conservative channel beyond their own universities.

For Amanda, responsible political engagement is about leaving the more sensationalistic, confrontational organizations behind. A student at the University of Arizona (UA), she was dispirited by the reactionary tone of many of the conservative clubs at her school. While she originally joined the College Republicans, she eventually left the group. “I came to campus and was so disappointed after my freshman year; [… the chapter is] really ultra-right at this point.” Her displeasure with the populist organization, Turning Point USA, was even more intense. “I just want to make [it] really clear: I would never join Turning Point.” The reason was that “they like conflict” but “that doesn’t appeal to me.” At the national level, the ascendancy of Trumpism also led Amanda to forgo attendance at the extremely popular and highly influential Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an event she once loved. “I wouldn’t even go to CPAC” anymore. “The year [Trump] was sworn in, I didn’t go.”

Disappointed with Trumpism and UA’s “ultra-right” groups, Amanda nevertheless remained deeply interested in politics, and she did not want to give up on conservatism altogether. Rather, she sought out new opportunities as she cultivated a more refined ideological perspective. She was getting her degree in the philosophy, politics, economics, and law program, a small, interdisciplinary major that promotes critical reflection on the fundamental values that shape society—which is also a program known on her campus to be a home base for intellectual conservatives. This program is associated with (but not formally attached to) UA’s controversial Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, founded in part by money from the Charles Koch Foundation. In addition, Amanda was a leader of the Executive Council, the student outreach program of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a well-known conservative think tank in Washington. As a member, Amanda and five other carefully selected UA students took part in AEI’s annual conferences and helped plan events at her school about topical issues.

On the flip side, Ariel was a passionate Trump supporter from the University of Colorado (CU). She thought that Trump’s presidency was a much-needed corrective to the conservative status quo. “I think he’s good for the [Republican Party], because I think the party needed some shaking up.” In contrast to Amanda, who admired establishment Republicans like Jeff Flake and John McCain, Ariel was unsure if she even wanted to identify as a Republican anymore. Focusing her invective on precisely the politicians Amanda respected, Ariel complained that Republican members of Congress were bungling Trump’s agenda, and, in this way, she said, “I feel like the whole Republican name has kind of lost its way.”

Given her support for the president, Ariel was not interested in a group like AEI. And she did not bother joining the College Republicans either, dismissing the latter group as destined for irrelevancy. Rather, Ariel was the president of CU’s Turning Point chapter, an organization that not only spent 4 years staunchly defending the Trump administration, but also made a name for itself by adopting mockery and antagonism as its primary political tactics. Turning Point also maintains the Professor Watchlist, a website for broadcasting instances of “leftist propaganda” on campus. Ariel appreciated “all this money” that the national organization sent to her club. This included help for bringing right-wing provocateurs Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at her school. Both events sparked large street protests by progressive students at CU.

Unlike Amanda, Ariel thought CPAC had only gotten better in the Trump era. She found it energizing to see the pundits and populist politicians that got top billing after 2016. Ariel also liked the “summits” hosted by Turning Point and the trainings offered by a conservative media organization called PragerU. As she explained, “Turning Point was kind of my start,” which then led her to connect with PragerU. “And it’s just a continuing domino effect of getting involved with these core groups.” As Ariel saw it, her activism for these organizations “opened up incredible opportunities.” The most recent of these was a trip to Los Angeles to meet with other top PragerU student “ambassadors” (known as PragerFORCE). There, Ariel networked with the group’s director, expecting it would help her get a leg up in conservative politics after graduation.

Amanda and Ariel are good examples of how conservative college students flow through the same channel, even while carving distinct paths through the political landscape of the right. Amanda was following a more civil route. This does not mean that the AEI niche she chose was without controversy. Partisan tensions are often so high on campus that ideological clashes can seem unavoidable. Regardless, Amanda’s preference was for engaging in what she believed could lead to bipartisan agreement, both while enrolled in college and in her political life beyond graduation. Ariel, on the other hand, sometimes spoke favorably of dialog and reaching out to progressives, but much of the mobilizing in which she took part, such as booking Coulter and Yiannopoulos for speaking events, was explicitly designed to incite anger from her classmates. This is the provocative route increasingly popular with conservative students, and it is one with a growing donor base behind it.

The external groups discussed here—AEI, Turning Point, and PragerU—are just a tiny sampling from a much larger universe of organizations making up the conservative channel of student activism. These three, like other groups in the channel, are heavily financed, giving them the resources to excel in their particular areas of focus. AEI supports right-leaning scholars and nurtures future policy makers through a well-funded annual internship program, a summer honors program, and even a recruitment funnel for full-time jobs after graduation. AEI eschews confrontational politics, but it is still highly critical of higher education and casts doubt on much of what is learned through a liberal arts degree.

Turning Point, on the other hand, embraces confrontation by explicitly seeking to mobilize the culture war on campus. It provides all-expenses-paid conferences and contact with national and regional field representatives who help students plan provocative events at their schools. PragerU is unique in that its focus is making slickly produced video shorts tackling social and cultural issues from a “Judeo-Christian perspective.” These videos, promoted on- and offline by PragerFORCE student ambassadors, rack up hundreds of millions of views and have been making waves in conservative circles for years.

Distinct as these three organizations are, they are unified in creating skepticism about the role of colleges and universities in American political culture, and they are especially critical of the professoriate’s impact on the lives of young people. In their own ways, therefore, each organization helps pull undergraduates outside of their schools by offering extra-institutional funding streams and encouraging alternative knowledge sources. In the case of AEI, there is a highly visible career funnel for activists too, providing a well-marked pathway into postbaccalaureate political work.

The Progressive Channel: Pushed Inside From the Left

Unlike outside conservative organizations that direct huge sums of money to student activists and sow doubt about the purpose and value of academia, outside progressive organizations generally express their faith in higher education. For example, left-leaning groups and individual donors provide billions of dollars for research, financial aid, endowments, and centers that serve students and faculty. Yet this largesse rarely targets student activism. Instead, left-leaning philanthropists generally assume that colleges and universities are already serving progressives’ best interests. Further, the American left is a patchwork of constituents, with organizations designed to address a panoply of concerns. This spreads resources thin and leaves little available for campus politics explicitly. Finally, college students’ support for the Democratic Party is often just assumed by organizers. Conservative groups, on the other hand, work vigorously (if not always successfully) to connect young people to the Republican Party. Given the contours of this political landscape, left-leaning students have come to expect little support from groups external to their campus.

To be clear, it is not that outside progressive organizations do not exist in higher education. They most certainly do. There is U.S. PIRG, Planned Parenthood, NextGen America, and many others. Indeed, the full list of liberal and leftist groups with on-campus ties is likely to be much larger than the list of conservative organizations. However, these organizations play a significantly smaller role in progressive students’ mobilizing tactics than the outside groups operating in the conservative channel.

Moreover, for the left-leaning groups supporting campus politics from the outside, they are dedicating far fewer resources to collegiate activism than organizations on the right. This relative lack of external funding creates a more insular relationship in progressive campus politics. The lower the financial support for students from the outside, the more activists turn toward resources available from within their schools to accomplish their goals. The more connected activists become inside campus units, the fewer ties they forge with external organizations.

If students on the left are wanting for resources from the outside, what they do have going for them are strong ideological connections inside their colleges and universities. Although not to the caricatured extent many conservative critics describe, left-of-center beliefs prevail in higher education. In the social sciences and humanities, students will almost inevitably take classes with professors espousing progressive ideologies. Schools invite speakers who advance liberal and leftist viewpoints. Administrators frequently collaborate with progressive activists to achieve diversity goals, even if not to the full satisfaction of most activists concerned with the issue. Politically engaged students on the left are also able to make use of multicultural centers, such as for Asian American, Black, Latinx, women, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+) students. Such centers often amplify the perspectives found in particular academic departments, and they provide institutional backing for progressive initiatives on campus.

All of this leads left-leaning students to have a sense of embeddedness and affinity within their schools. But perhaps counterintuitively, such close ties can blind progressive students to the many ways their ideologies are actually supported—day in and day out—on campus. This taken-for-granted sense of belonging is a far cry from how conservatives describe their college experiences, but fish are unaware of the water in which they swim. Thus, the inverse of students on the right feeling alienated at their schools is that progressives feel at home without thinking much about it—until they may push for greater institutional change than academic bureaucracies normally afford.

The multiple institutional attachments of Lydia, a leftist student at Arizona, provide an example. “My freshman year, I was an intern in the Women’s Resource Center,” and “I also have done stuff for Housing and Residential Life. There is one program called Advocates Coming Together. I was the co-director for that, and that was kind of like general social justice education for some residents who are part of that group.” Lydia’s list went on, including a stint as a peer advisor in the dorms, coordinated by the Office for Equity and Student Engagement. After her sophomore year, Lydia moved from the Women’s Resource Center to LGBTQ Affairs, where she became acquainted with a network of students forming the advocacy group Marginalized Students of the University of Arizona (MSUA). Lydia also worked for the campus Safe Zone program over the summer, “which is a training program about LGBTQ identities.” Although Lydia was unusually involved on her campus, her experiences show how institutional spaces on campus are plentiful, interconnected, and animated by issues progressives care about.

Multicultural centers are especially significant for left-leaning students, helping political engagements in two crucial ways. First, these centers serve as the crossroads where collegians meet like-minded peers. This is important for building the alliances that are essential for successful mobilizing. Atlas, a liberal student at UA, explained that MSUA “is a coalition of all the different cultural centers and a lot of the different politically active groups” whose goals are “just kind of spelling out for the university what is needed from them in order [for students] to feel successful and feel like we had a place at the table.” Sheridan, an MSUA member, said that the original point of the coalition was to “come together to create a list of demands from every center” on campus. Lydia spoke of the social ties shared by members of these groups, “There were students from the different resource and cultural centers, [and they] are the ones who got together because we already had that established relationship to each other.”

Second, beyond serving as hubs where students become acquainted with one another, multicultural centers are spaces where activists can seek direction from staff on how to frame their demands to school administrators. Alexa, another MSUA member, pointed to the delicate balance required of these relationships, saying staff “didn’t want to step on our toes” by being too directive, but “sometimes it was helpful when there [were] staff at our meetings to give us advice when we wouldn’t know what to do.” Further, many of MSUA’s demands were requests made on behalf of multicultural center employees, underscoring the synergistic relationship between progressive activists and the professional staff members who work in the centers.

Further, the professional staff in the multicultural centers are sometimes former activists themselves, and they can use their new positions to help shepherd undergraduates through the process of mobilizing for various causes—much like how field representatives in the conservative channel guide political activities on the right. Yet these center employees must tread carefully. On the one hand, their official capacity gives them real power in campus politics compared to outside organizational voices. On the other hand, they often feel the need to pump the brakes on more radical demands for institutional change, as they know it will upset administrators. An interview with two staff members at Colorado’s Environmental Center illustrates this tension. “I don’t want to say [‘student activism’ is] a dirty word,” explained one of them, but, “We can’t do that anymore,” interjected the other. “We are student affairs people.” Such ambivalent support for their efforts can lead students to feel jaded and distrustful of the officials pulling the purse strings in the progressive channel. By contrast, the leaders within the conservative channel—funded from the outside—are free from such conflicting priorities.

The MSUA case provides a useful illustration of the progressive channel’s successes but also its shortcomings. MSUA members met many times with administrators and were able to win several concessions over two academic years. In response to the group’s demands, new staffing lines for the multicultural centers were granted. But the years-long experience left many of the activists feeling deflated. Reflecting on the consortium, Alexa said that MSUA had “made some progress. But all the progress that’s made is the non-controversial stuff, like adding more mental health counselors, adding more financial aid counselors, creating more staff positions, and making some trainings more creative. Those are pretty easy to do.” The “hard” stuff that activists wanted—forcing the university to move away from a corporatist model of education; requiring cultural sensitivity courses for all faculty, students, and staff on campus; eradicating inequities in the college experience—were never realized. Administrators fell far short of MSUA’s expectations, and many student members became bitter over the whole ordeal. Most conservative students at UA, on the other hand, felt MSUA’s demands were misguided in the first place.

In sum, progressive activists are in the thick of things on campus. They consider most of their professors and classmates to be at least similar-minded allies. Multicultural centers are built in the name of groups and causes in which both students and school officials believe, and they help foster young people’s advocacy skills. Activists frequently work with staff in student affairs offices too. And these students have the ears of administrators, particularly left-leaning groups advocating for underrepresented populations. Yet this concerted activity in the progressive channel—hamstrung by bureaucratic inertia and a disconnect between radical left ambition and liberal compromise—can lead to skepticism about school officials’ real motives and cynicism that any substantive changes will ever be enacted. Further, progressive activists describe their possible routes into left-leaning political jobs as much clunkier, opaque, and far more do-it-yourself than what is found in the conservative channel.

From Massification to Polarization

During the 75 years since the publication of Higher Education for American Democracy, the massive growth of the postsecondary sector created a vast new lifeworld for young people in the United States. Colleges and universities have become a key arena for political discourse and activism in American life. The modes of student activism we describe here reveal the maturity of distinctive channels for political mobilization. The progressive channel represents the institutionalization of the radical student movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It embodies one of the signal consequences of the era of left-wing activism: a presumption that the academy itself is now progressive turf. The conservative channel represents the institutionalization of a rightward countermovement that sees the academy as abnegating its duties in promoting the ideals of objective discourse and individual liberty. While some activists in the conservative channel seek to balance the ideological lop-sidedness of academia, many more of them envision campus mobilization as a stepping stone to political activism in the larger polity—a perspective that encourages provocative, headline-grabbing tactics.

Our research on the contours of contemporary political activism on public university campuses reminds us of the fundamental contingency of major institutional change. In the middle of the 20th century, American political elites called for massification in the name of preserving democracy. The success of their call reconfigured the entire landscape of political discourse in this country, as young people used the newly expanded public square of college campuses to fashion new claims for their own empowerment. In many respects, the political engagement enabled through these channels exemplifies George F. Zook’s vision for how the college experience could enrich students’ lives and promote an informed and thoughtful citizenry. However, even though these channels result from expanding and diversifying access to academia, the contentious nature of many of the issues animating collegiate activism threaten to undermine the continued massification of postsecondary learning.

America has entered a political period in which support for higher education has become a partisan matter. Belief that colleges and universities have a positive effect on society, or that professors act in the public interest, is much lower among Republicans than Democrats. Echoing and amplifying such views, television networks like Fox News and websites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller routinely use campus events, student protests, and faculty commentary to depict academia as utterly out of touch with traditional values. In turn, conservative politicians grandstand on slashing school budgets to stem the tide of what they feel is left-wing indoctrination.

While progressives are usually reluctant to admit it, there are kernels of truth in the conservative critique of higher education. The left and liberals have been successful at dominating campus politics, and progressive activists enjoy a position of power and comfort at their schools foreign to their conservative peers. Numerous academic disciplines emphasize left-leaning worldviews. Progressive faculty far outnumber right-leaning professors, and administrators and staff promote a liberal-friendly agenda of multiculturalism, equity, and inclusion—in word, at least, if not always in deed.

But, for all the ideological heft the left enjoys on college campuses, the conservative channel has the financial backing and the tactical acumen to circumvent much of this institutional disadvantage. AEI’s internships and educational programs are an example of a right-leaning organization showing strategic foresight absent on the left. And some of the students AEI helps train are likely to be crafting policies designed to limit public spending on the postsecondary sector in the years to come. More troubling, barring a seismic shift in the political landscape, right-leaning students will continue hosting controversial and illiberal speakers because groups like Turning Point benefit from disrupting campus life, especially when the ensuing outrage can be harnessed into narratives about politically correct culture running amok. Likewise, PragerU will keep churning out videos undermining academic consensus on climate change, structural racism, gender inequality, and more.

If the right continues to pummel the left—that is, if state and federal governments further retreat from past commitments to fund colleges and universities, if the Republican Party mistrusts expertise and scientific data, if scholars are denied their academic freedom, if underrepresented populations are limited in their ability to obtain the same credentials as those from privileged classes—we, as a society, lose. There are reasons to be critical of some aspects of progressive activism found on college campuses, but the value of postsecondary learning to civic participation is, we believe, immeasurable.

While our expertise is not in the area of policy, our time studying this topic has brought us to a few conclusions. First, conservative donors need to be pushing the organizations dependent on their largesse to encourage civic responsibility over sensational encounters. Progressive organizations, on the other hand, could benefit from building up a national infrastructure that looks more like what we find on the right. If nothing else, this would help provide opportunities for liberal and leftist undergraduates to move into political careers more seamlessly after college. These students would also benefit from greater guidance in connecting with community partners in their areas of interest. Further, professors (along with support from administrators and staff) should help expose students to the depth of intellectual thought found on the right side of the political spectrum too. One-sided teaching only makes some curious students more open to the illiberalism of right-wing populism.

Today we confront the irony that the success of massification is helping to fuel efforts at retrenchment. Continuing the promise of expanding and diversifying postsecondary learning, therefore, will require reshaping the political landscape in ways that minimize the partisanship of knowledge. That, of course, is easier said than done, but conceptualizing the dynamics at play on campuses and considering how the progressive and conservative channels for student activism interact is an important first step. 

Additional information

Funding

Spencer Foundation

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey L. Kidder

Jeffrey Kidder is a Professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, where his work addresses a variety of topics within the area of cultural sociology. His most recent research focuses on collegiate activism with an emphasis on the intersection of political identities and worldviews in students’ lives.

Amy J. Binder

Amy Binder is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, where she studies higher education from a cultural, political, and organizational perspective. Beyond research into collegiate activism, her recent work also explores the career pipelines available to students at elite universities.