The Conservative Long Game in Higher Ed, Part 6: Legal Threats & Law Enforcement

One aspect of problem solving and activism–one that does not often occur to me—is the invocation of legal threats or actions. This probably has something to do with growing up with fewer monetary and legal resources, or not having lawyers in the family. While life has taught me a number of lessons about the usefulness of the law as a pressure tactic, it is just not an angle that comes to me first. Calling law enforcement or a lawyer, in my mind, is the last resort.

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s late 1960s conservative activists, however, worked in this area without hesitation. They used the law like any other regular tool in order to achieve their desired ends on campus. Charges of disorder, slander, libel, and/or breach of contract, or raising concerns about the denial of First Amendment rights, helped them to shape their institutions according to their own ideals.

One tactic used by Young Americans for Freedom members at Columbia University, in the spring of 1968, was to publicize the fact that they had secured legal counsel to fight ongoing sit-ins. If administrators would not throw the lefty bums off campus, maybe the lawyers would. (Note: See pages 80-85 of Shepherd’s text for more on what had occurred up to that point regarding SDS and and Afro-American Society (SAS) protestors about the university’s Defense Department contract and the expansion of a gym into the neighborhood.)

A major legal point for YAF protestors was that Columbia was breaching its contract with non-protesting students. The protestors deprived conservative, patriotic students of their educational rights by not taking a hard line with “middle-class students playing at ‘revolution’” on campus. The YAFers threatened to bring suits, Shepherd relays, not only against protesters but also against soft administrators and inattentive trustees for a “breach of fiduciary responsibility.” Institutional leaders were not preventing striking Lefties from “interfering with the civil rights of conscientious students to pursue their academic careers” (p. 93).

With the Columbia legal situation in motion, YAF distributed legal kits to campus conservatives at other institutions, encouraging similar lawsuits. The ultimate national goal was to prevent university leadership from shutting down any campus. A shut down, to them, meant their tuition dollars were wasted and the student-university contract was broken. Shepherd tells us that the Columbia University precedent enabled legal actions in Texas, New York, and California (p. 93).

Apart from breach of contract, another suit by campus conservatives at Boston College argued that a shutdown, or a lack of action against leftist student radicals, amounted to taking a political stance. The institution would be taking leftist positions by default. This failure to act would, they argued, put the university’s tax-exempt status at risk (p. 93-94).  As an aside, this legal angle caused me to wonder how the University of Chicago maintained its 1967 Kalven Report stance of neutrality. At some point I will need to look into their potential defenses against the YAF tax-exempt angle (perhaps UChicago was not a tax-exempt institution at that point?).

Beyond lawsuits, YAF members also called on law enforcement to police and investigate leftist activists. Politicians and activists wanted campus, city, state, and federal authorities to investigate both people and specific situations. Shepherd cites the example, in Oklahoma, of the creation of the “Sooner CIA”—an inter-agency and militaristic group that surveilled antiwar and civil rights activists. Shepherd reminds readers that the FBI both monitored student activists and received requests from university administrators to investigate SDS members and activities (p. 94). As an aside, I would like to know more about what kinds of university “administrators” (i.e., deans? department chairs? board of trustee members? clerks? faculty leaders? presidents? provosts?) were submitting these requests. I want to know more about their politics, exact positions, demographics, etc.

Conservative students would go so far as to invite police on campus to monitor demonstrations. These conservative ‘anti-activist conservative activists’ (my neologism) would attempt to get photographs of SDS and antiwar demonstrators acting “illegally.” They might supply these pictures to local journalists. Campus conservatives might also serve as witnesses for investigators (or, if you prefer, stool pigeons or informers). Shepherd notes that this helped them “establish working relationships with local media and police” (p. 95).

Shepherd relays that alumni and individuals asked the White House to get involved in investigations and enforcement. President Nixon’s staff generally left matters to local or campus authorities. However, Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell enforced “criminal laws against interstate travel to commit a riot” (p. 94). Consideration was also given to the federal government’s power to deny federal financial aid to individual students.

Congress also got involved. Shepherd recalls for readers that two separate committees were formed by the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate campus political activities: the Special Education Subcommittee and the Internal Security Committee (p. 95). They both focused their hearings on campus demonstrations. Testimony came “from police, reporters, members of the House Un-American Activities [yes, that still existed!], and college administrators” (p. 95). The Internal Security Committee, Shepherd recounts, utilized an informer: Donald Meinshausen, a YAF member. To aid his work, Meinshausen—with material aid from the House committee—even established an SDS chapter at Essex County College (p. 95). In the Senate, its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations considered an “anti-riot clause” that would have denied funding to higher ed institutions that did not assist investigators (p. 95). All of this resulted in nineteen organizations being the targets of congressional investigations, with three receiving the “most intense scrutiny”: SDS, SNCC, and the Black Panther Party. Connecting these efforts back to the White House, Shepherd notes that President Nixon wanted all related congressional hearings on campus activities to be televised (p. 95).

Campus conservatives and YAF members, then, were neither hesitant nor shy about enrolling the help of outside resources to force institutions to comply with their vision for the delivery of higher education. Whether they used lawyers, lawsuits, legal threats, police, or government investigative means, campus conservatives and their outside allies focused their energies on squelching leftist agitators. They wanted law, order, quiet, and compliance enforced in an environment of unjust laws, structural racism, and imperial war overseas. In this, anti-activist conservative activists were a force to be reckoned with.

The series continues next week. – TL