In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In 2004 and 2007, members of the College Republicans on a campus we call Western Flagship University staged an eye-popping event called the Affirmative Action Bake Sale.1 The bake sale is a well-known piece of political theater that conservative students put on at many universities across the country, wherein members of right-leaning campus organizations sell baked goods at a higher price to white passersby than to, say, African Americans or Latinos/Latinas. The event is said to highlight, while also parodying, the deleterious effects on all students of affirmative action policies. Student sponsors argue that the event opens up discussion of an important topic that all too frequently remains unacknowledged on liberally biased campuses. But when they talk about what it is like to stage the event and to get others’ reactions to it, it is clear that they also revel in the sheer fun and provocation that their activity stirs up. The Flagship students who put on events that we have labeled “provocative” are tickled to rile liberals at their universities as they make their political points. Moreover, they are supported in their theatricality by national organizations designed to foster such conservative activism on campus. On a different college campus, two thousand miles away, which we call Eastern Elite University, such an event is considered verboten—not by campus liberals or college administrators and faculty, but by conservative students themselves. On this campus, most conservative undergraduates denounce the act of pushing liberals’ buttons as sophomoric, as well as ineffective at recruiting potential fellow travelers or encouraging debate on an issue. Most conservative students at Eastern Elite argue that it is beneficial to conduct respectful arguments and to try to reach out to the other side, to learn from their political adversaries, and to create a well-tempered conservative presence on campus. They actively disdain the national conservative organizations that encourage theatrical events like the Bake Sale, accusing those organizations of having a populist reputation. Instead c h a p t e r s i x “Civil” or “Provocative”? Varieties of Conservative Student Style and Discourse in American Universities amy j. binder and k ate wood “Civil” or “Provocative”? 159 of engaging in provocative public actions, most students at Eastern Elite extol the virtues of what we have labeled “civilized discourse,” to be used among themselves , as well as with faculty, administrators, and their liberal peers. These dominant styles of conservatism on the Western Flagship and Eastern Elite campuses exist within a broader spectrum of activity that includes some other options. While the styles described above strongly dominate on their respective campuses, other approaches can be found as subordinate or submerged styles (DiMaggio and Powell 1991; Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). At Eastern, for example, a conservative style of insurgency, or what we label “highbrow provocation ,” thrives mainly in the pages of the campus’s conservative newspaper. Though often drawing the ire of campus conservatives practicing the dominant style, a subset of conservative students participates actively in penning the intense , philosophical, and at times vitriolic editorials within its pages.2 These differences in conservative styles across campuses are strong and stark and deserve sustained analysis. In some ways, the differences are surprising. As Robert Horwitz (2013) and others have pointed out, for decades the Republican Party has been pulled to the right by “antiestablishment conservatives” whose slash-and-burn tactics have become the style du jour of institutional politics. It is therefore possible to imagine that eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds who have a proclivity for conservative ideology would participate in a shared system of national-level, right-of-center beliefs and use similar styles on their home campuses . After all, this population is wired in to multiple forms of widely disseminated technological media, from Facebook pages devoted to conservative causes to 24/7 streaming cable news channels and constantly updated right-leaning blogs. Were they interested in investigating “what is wrong with the liberal campus ,” they also would have encountered the ideas of “movement conservatives” (Tanenhaus 2009) located in right-leaning think tanks, foundations, and media outlets such as Fox News, which champion the cause of right-of-center undergraduates (Horowitz 2007; Kors and Silverglate 1998; Maranto, Redding, and Hess 2009). Students could even get their hands on the “Campus Conservative Battle Plan,” distributed by the Young America’s Foundation, which provides ready-made plans for actions like the provocative Bake Sale and, currently, for staging dramatic...

Share