Welcome to our inaugural group of USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars! In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, we are proud to host such a fantastic array of scholars studying diverse aspects of the field. Please join us in welcoming our USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars: Cari S. Babitzke, Matthew Guariglia, Zachary Jacobson, Drew Maciag, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, and Rick Townsend. We’ll be introducing you to a new Community Scholar daily, so please stay tuned right here for their research finds and updates.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is an instructor at the University of New Orleans. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). She is active on Twitter and Instagram at @llassabe. Read on to learn more about Lauren’s scholarship and her plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:
“In my first book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars, I argued that anti-New Left student groups of the 1960s weren’t organic as they claimed, but designed and funded by conservative movement leaders and anti-New Deal business interests to do their political bidding on the campus. This cohort of college students graduated and ‘grew up’ to become the New Right of the 1970s who took over Congress in the 1990s. The goal for each of these generations of movement leaders was (and remains) to create bulwarks against an apparently rampant and destructive anti-Americanism they believe emanates from the ivory tower.
I intend to pick up where I left off in Resistance from the Right for a second monograph, tentatively titled “Since the Sixties” about the Right and their endeavors in steering—even dismantling—public higher education into the twenty-first century. The youth organizations I studied in the first project not only still exist but are supplemented by new right-wing think tanks and educational nonprofits. Through these nonprofits, the Right continues to train and fund young conservatives headed for the academy as professors and administrators, as well as others whose future careers will influence higher education through policy, the media, or the legal system.
For the last decade, much ink has been spilled over multiple concurrent crises in public higher education: the adjunctification crisis, the student debt crisis, the enrollment crisis, even conservatives’ manufactured crisis over critical race theory. This book seeks to answer the question: How did we get here? Right-wing educational nonprofits and the policies, laws, and people they have influenced are the focus of this post-Sixties political and social history of the academy.”
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