New book – Conservatives more active on campus than you think

Think of politics on a typical college campus, and you’re likely to think of liberal politics. Colleges, the conventional thinking goes, are naturally liberal places. To some conservative critics, they’re even hotbeds of liberal indoctrination—boot-camps at which liberal professors, still fighting the battles of the 1960s, use their influence and prestige to sway their students.

Perhaps because of their über-liberal image, not much has been written about how colleges might shape conservative students. That’s changed, though, withBecoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, by the sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood of UCSD. Binder and Wood spent an academic year talking with conservative students and alumni at two big universities: “Eastern Elite,” a prestigious private school on the East Coast, and “Western Public,” a vibrant state university in the American West.

There are plenty of conservative students on campus, they found—and they are shaped by their universities, too, in fascinating ways that relate to our country’s political culture as a whole.