Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s Resistance from the Right offers a lively, revelatory, and at times profoundly distressing history of right-wing student activism on American campuses during the late 1960s. Painstakingly tracing the student right’s contrived contestations and reactionary resistances, Shepherd nonetheless urges historians to take even the most self-aggrandizing, victimhood-weaponizing campus politics seriously, centring student organizing as a critical component of late twentieth-century America’s broader rightward turn. Shepherd thereby situates recent attacks on critical race theory as solely one notable battle within conservatives’ “decades-long war against the academy and the cultural changes that liberal education champions” (3).

In the wake of President Trump’s attacks on DEI, Resistance from the Right has been published at a crucial moment, two decades since comparable studies by John A. Andrew and Kenneth J. Heineman. While alive to the influence of financial support and guidance from political elites, Shepherd’s study nevertheless centres the students themselves, including several who – from Newt Gingrich and Bill Barr to David Duke and Pat Buchanan – later became significant figures in right-wing politics. Shepherd scrutinizes the fractious and often furious coalitional politics of student campaigning through fifty-six oral histories, personal artefacts, university special collections, and the archives of the Hoover Institution and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon presidential libraries.

Resistance from the Right strikingly exemplifies the recent focus of historians of late twentieth-century conservatism on more grassroots, localized, and less ideologically clear-cut histories of right-wing mobilization. This is most evident in the first section, “Coalition Building.” This section assesses how anti-New Deal elders during the postwar era founded, facilitated, and financed an array of right-wing student organizations, including College Republicans, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Young Americans for Freedom. Shepherd argues that these organizations mobilized coalitions less around any unifying conservative credo and more around reactionary anticommunism and defending Christian, heteronormative, and racially majoritarian definitions of Americanness.

Throughout, Shepherd deftly captures the shifting commitments and contestations between these groups, expanding studies of campus conservatism beyond single-organization case studies. This remains, however, intentionally more organizational history than intellectual history – Shepherd argues that the student right was “largely devoid of unique ideas” and “ideologically fickle,” united by “reflexive anti-liberalism” (79). This definition, however, risks inadvertently naturalizing conservative ideologies rather than tracing them as evolving, constructed, and contingent ideological projects and critically historicizing their gendered, national, and racial assumptions. Indeed, those seeking in-depth analysis of the student right’s more immediate postwar origins may have to look elsewhere. Resistance from the Right ultimately focusses more on the increasingly militant student right that became influential after the New Left and Black Power protests of the spring of 1968.

Shepherd’s writing reads most lucidly in chapters, including chapter 4, that centre on single case studies. Wider-ranging chapters, including chapter 1, are organized effectively, if somewhat unorganically, by subtitles. The set pieces uncovered are nevertheless captivating. At Columbia in 1968, some 250 coat-and-tie-sporting counterprotestors – marshalling a dignified image of young white masculinity against the “disheveled adversary” (84) of SDS hippies and less affluent Harlem residents – encircled buildings occupied by demonstrators, forming human chains to prevent food reaching SDS occupiers. Demonstrators took to throwing bread, fruit, and salami, which conservative students intercepted using blankets and trays. Amid such scenes, Shepherd suggests that conservative students often “did not (or felt they did not need to) come to terms with the actual matters at hand” (87).

Confrontations during the spring of 1968 set the stage for the more combative activism surveyed in Part Two, “Law, Order, and Punishment.” What Jeffrey C. Alexander and Dylan Rodriguez respectively call “white frontlash” and “white Reconstruction” come to the fore here. Shepherd first examines the student right’s support for reactionary politicians during the 1968 presidential election and its attacks on the civil rights and Black studies movements. During this period, the student right turned increasingly to ideological purification, expelling libertarians from Young Americans for Freedom. A particularly interesting section examines the student right’s increasingly preemptive responses to anti-Vietnam War protests. Shepherd demonstrates how conservatives aimed to “force administrators to choose between the peace movement’s right to demonstrate and the Right’s demands for order and punishment” (162). “It became clear,” suggests Shepherd, “that the only way for the campus Right to remain a cohesive force was to incite deeper suspicions and fears concerning the New Left. They had no unifying ideas of their own” (168).

Inevitably, a 280-page text cannot capture all the vivid particularities of student activism’s many settings and contexts. Further in-depth campus studies beyond Columbia could have enriched this picture. Women’s roles within the student right – notwithstanding an interesting but brief discussion (24–26) – could have been spotlighted further. In a first book of wide-ranging relevance that is nevertheless narrowly chronologically focussed, Shepherd’s conclusion still capably surveys higher education since 1970. This conclusion illustrates the urgent necessity of accessible surveys of right-wing educational politics since 1968, surveys that might further address certain major contemporary themes – from campus militarization to neoliberalism – that those resisting from the left may find surveyed too briefly here. Equally, there remains a clear need for university histories that decentre the 1960s and further connect campus politics with the conservative school politics described by Adam Laats and Cody Dodge Ewert. Finally, if, like Ellen Schrecker’s sweeping recent survey of the 1960s American university, Shepherd’s narrative is primarily one of decline, this also raises important questions about how histories of university spaces can remain politically enabling in our embattled present.

In sum, this compelling study of paradox and outrage is a feat of careful, from-the-ground-up scholarship. Shepherd’s deft combination of contemporary relevance and human interest will appeal to anyone inquisitive about twentieth-century conservatism, including undergraduates and general readers. Perhaps Resistance from the Right’s primary virtue is its insistence that any discussion of twentieth-century American conservatism must place right-wing campus mobilization at the very centre of our analysis. Combined with the increasing polarization of campus politics and recent seminal works by scholars of education, including Jarvis Givens, Resistance from the Right thus presents an all-too-timely reminder of education’s critical role in societal resistance, struggle, and transformation.