We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.
They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.
Back then, college presidents routinely caved to the demands of conservative legislators, angry taxpayers and other wellsprings of anticommunist outrage against students striking for peace and civil rights.
If the past is any indication, the road ahead won’t be any easier for college presidents like Shafik.
Lawfare from the right
Throughout the 1960s, students organized a host of peace and civil rights protests, which conservatives characterized as communist.
Students spoke out against American involvement in the Vietnam War, the draft and compulsory ROTC participation. They demanded civil rights protections and racially representative curricula. The intervention of police and the National Guard often escalated what were peaceful protests into violent riots and total campus shutdowns.
From 1968 into the 1970s, conservative lawyers coordinated a national campaign to sue “indecisive and gutless” college presidents and trustees whose approach to campus demonstrations was, in conservatives’ estimation, too lenient.
The right-wing organization Young Americans for Freedom hit 32 colleges with lawsuits, including private Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, as well as public land-grant universities like Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin.
The legal claim was for breach of contract: that presidents were failing to follow through on their end of the tuition agreement by not keeping campuses open and breaking up the protests. Young Americans for Freedom sought to set legal precedent for students, parents and broadly defined “taxpayers” to be able to compel private and public institutions to remain open.
Conservative students further demanded that their supposedly communist peers be expelled indefinitely, arrested for trespassing and prosecuted.
Expulsions, of course, carried implications for the draft during these years. A running joke among right-wing activists and politicians was that protesters should be given a “McNamara Scholarship” to Hanoi, referencing Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense and an architect of the Vietnam War.
We’ve been here before. In my book “Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America,” I detail how, throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, conservative activists led a counterattack against campus antiwar and civil rights demonstrators by demanding action from college presidents and police.
They made a number of familiar claims about student protesters: They were at once coddled elitists, out-of-state agitators and violent communists who sowed discord to destroy America. Conservatives claimed that the protests interfered with the course of university activities and that administrators had a duty to guarantee daily operations paid for by tuition.
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