Season 6, Episode 4: Conservatism on College Campuses: A Conversation with Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd and Sophie Wunderlich

In this episode of Reverb Effect, Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd and Sophie Wunderlich look at the long history of conservative student activism on American college campuses. The popular image of the 1960s student is a protester against the Vietnam War or for civil rights. That same decade also saw the rise of right-wing student groups like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We explore how national leaders and donors built these groups, what they called grassroots organizing, and how they copied the tactics of the left. We also follow the students who later became prominent figures in the Republican Party, the courts, and conservative media, and trace the right’s century-long fight with higher education up to today’s campus culture wars.

In this episode of Reverb Effect, we look at the long history of conservative student activism on American college campuses. The popular image of the 1960s student is a protester against the Vietnam War or for civil rights. That same decade also saw the rise of right-wing student groups like Young Americans for Freedom and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. We explore how national leaders and donors built these groups, what they called grassroots organizing, and how they copied the tactics of the left. We also follow the students who later became prominent figures in the Republican Party, the courts, and conservative media, and trace the right’s century-long fight with higher education up to today’s campus culture wars.

Lauren Lassabe-Shepherd is a historian of American colleges and universities and a community scholar affiliate of Indiana University and the Society for US Intellectual History. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Sophie Wunderlich received her PhD in History in 2025 and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of the Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

View the full episode transcript.

Production Credits

Episode Producers: Sophie Wunderlich

Season Producer: Cheyenne Pettit

Executive Producer: Joseph W. Ho

Editorial Board: Joseph W. Ho, Kenneth Mills, Gregory Parker

Music: Eguana, “Wind In Wheat Fields” (Endless Quest Media)

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