during the election as this young preacher from georgia which is dr. martin luther king jr. who sort of leads the masses of african-americans from racial to presentation. so in this notion that a rosa sat and, you know, martin could do this stuff and jesse could run and then barack could fly, all these things, they sound good, but they really simply few a much more complicated history. and that complicated history really involves so many african-americans, women and men, who proactively dismantled racial segregation including rosa parks. rosa parks was an activist. she didn't just refuse to give up her seat by accident, it was a concerted, strategic effort to try to transform democratic institutions. >> tufts university history professor and author of "dark days, bright nights," peniel joseph, specializes in the sub field of africana. his latest, "stokely: a life," will be in bookstores march 4th. sunday he'll take your questions in depth live for three hours starting at noon eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> next on booktv, amy binder takes an in-depth look at the experiences and activism of conservative students on the campuses of america's colleges and universities. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. >> well, thank you very much for coming out on this rainy thursday. and thank you very much to christine and to larry for unviolating me to the center -- inviting me to the center. for more than half a century, conservative critics housing in think tanks, foundations and the media have championed the cause of conservative college students who they say suffer on college campuses. in books with such titles as "free fall of the american university" and "tenured radicals," critics charge that american higher education has become the playpen of liberal, if not radical faculty, and that in the classrooms of the university, middle of road students consume their professors' misinformation. liberal students are smug and feeling that they're on the righteous side of politics, and conservative students have to to decide whether to endure their professors' tirades quietly or voice their outrage, running the rusk of sacrificing their grades -- risk of sacrificing their grades. now, to mitigate the effects of the leftist campus, organizations have been put in place. david horowitz, for instance, has introduced the academic bill of rights to legally protect students from liberal orthodoxy while others like the young americas foundation sponsor conferences that introduce thousands of student on the right to celebrities in the movement. the clare boothe luce policy institute is targeted to college women while intellectual organizations like the intercollegiate studies institute started by william f. buckley or the federalist society or the institution for humane studies at george mason university provide internships and seminars for budding conservative academics and future jurists, and the list goes on with the support of foundations with many familiar names. while this movement to build a core of young ideological, dependable lawyers, journalists, congressional staff and voters has been a central priority of right, very few social scientists have studied the effort to mobilize these students or to examine just how these students experience their undergraduate lives in the first place. and this has left us in the odd situation of not knowing if the accusations leveled against universities resonate with the students on whose behalf they're made, nor do we know much of anything else about these students, sup as when and how -- such as when and how do they become conservative, what are their political turning points before end during college? what are the issues that they care about, and how do these differ from their elders be they do? who do conservative students know in the world of thought and poll the ticks, how are tear networks formed, and we've been more or less in the dark about how students on the right actually enact hair conservativism on campus, what kinds of speech and action do they use, from what repertory do they select? and just how does conservative speech and action vary from campus to campus, if at all? in the absence of good social science research on these questions, one could have a general sense that conservative college students are a fatherly homogeneous -- fairly homogeneous bunch, but is it true? and this is where my co-author, kate wood, and i come in. i apologize for the, treatmently crowded slide on -- extremely crowded slide on board. and we come in with our book "becoming right" which is a comparative case study of two universities. in choosing to study students at eastern elite private university and western flagship public university, our idea was to see if we could get better purchase on how universities might be understood to uniquely shape students' politics. sociologists and other social scientists have long been interested in universities' effects on students' political attitudes, their behaviors, their values, but the bulk of this research known as college effects research uses national or campus-level draw that sets based deny data sets based on surveys to measure whether students change in their participation rates like voting, whether that increases or decreases because of college. it measures if college modifies students' political orientations one withdraw or another from conservative to liberal, say, but by my estimation as important as this work is, it's also a rather thin way of thinking about students' political development. or how they actually experience politics during their college years. what the political socialization literature can't do, it wasn't designed to do it either theoretically or med logically, is consider the multiple ways that college campuses as interactional settings among lots of different people on campus which are made up of distinctive organizational features -- housing, class size, student-to-faculty ratios -- as well as cultural understandings of who we are on this campus as a campus community. how it is that these campus features might give meaning to and shape young people's political ideas and actions. so by using qualitative measures, in particular in-depth interviews, also field work op these campuses and also at conferences and in conservative organizations, we wanted to see if and how universities play a significant role in fundamentally constituting new political ideas and discovering new models for action in one's conservative behavior. now, kate and i very fortunately aren't alone in how we think college campuses should be understood as generaltive systems of meaning rather than repositories of previously-formed individual perspectives among students. so for those of you in the know about sociology education, i don't know if there are sociologists of education in the audience, but you won't be surprised to learn that we position our study on the same book shelf as several recently published works which show how universities act as hubs and incubators for particular types of students to flourish. elizabeth armstrong and laura hamilton, although they're not studying in political formation, do look at how a public university in the midwest is set up to facilitate what they call a party pathway. they have party dorms, they have very ample fraternity network and so forth, and this creates the identities of partiers at this university. seamus khan and -- [inaudible] fernandez in separate books look at how elite boarding schools manufacture in students particular models of self-confidence and of self-deservingness as they move on to college. and we're also informed by older work, as i've indicated above. and in particular, i'll draw your attention to meyer in their various studies about higher education this different ways -- in different ways charter unique identities and lifestyle possibilities. and we're bringing politics to to the mix. now, on the conservative research end of things, this is also very fortunately -- because we really need to learn a lot more about the politics of right and our polarized society as larry mentioned -- there's a new body of work that focuses not only on christian or extremist conservativism or conservativism among women which is where most sociological attention has been paid in the past i would argue, but also on fiscal conservativism, on the infrastructure of conservativism, the think tanks, the foundations, the university centers. and on the historical add vebt of anti--- advent of anti-establishment or movement conservativism including excellent new projects on the tea party. and i've indicated a few of these educational conservative research projects on the slide, but in the grand scheme what i'm talking about today as well as in the book is wringing these research streams together to look at how university campuses is today's conservative politics intersect and how college shapes the nature, the activities and fundamentally the formation of politically conservative cells. so turning now from our conceptual framework to our data, i want to say a few words about our case study schools and our sample. now, as i start ised thinking about this project -- i started thinking about this project in the summer of 2007, i had a whole bunch of case study campuses that i thought i might look at, six -- as many as suggestion at one time. that didn't prove feasible. i selected eastern elite and western public universities for comparison along dimensions of both similarity and difference which is a classic case study selection methodology designed to gain insights, and i can tell you why they've been given pseudonyms later in q&a if anybody's interested. now, in terms of similarities, eastern elite was a religious institution at its founding, but that was a long time ago. both are research one university ies meaning that they grant ph.d.s and politically at least by reputation both of these schools are in the conservative spotlight as liberal bastions. so if you listen to conservative am radio or you read "the wall street journal" editorial page, you might hear complaints about both of these universities amongst others. now, in terms of differences, obviously, one is private, one is public with all of dumpses that this dis-- dunkses make. they differ in eastern elite taking about 1 in every 11 applicant, western public takes 1 in 2. they also differ in size and faculty of students, eastern has 7,000, western public has about 25,000 students with a student-to-faculty ratio of 18 to 1. and they differ in both their organizational features that i mentioned earlier, housing, dining, physical size of campus, percent of students in frats and organizations like that as well as in cultural features including what we might call their or institutional ethos. so eastern is one of the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the world while western is known for its faculty's research, it's also known to be a party school. it's a place where students know that they can enjoy a recreational atmosphere. now, to find interviewees for the study, i began with clubs and other groups that posted on the internet for both of these campuses. so in 2008 just before and after the presidential election -- i note here this is before the emergence of the tea party -- i interviewed leaders and members of each campus' college republicans, pro-life groups, columnists for the conservative newspapers as well as conservative columnists for the mainstream newspapers on campus, anti-gun control groups, libertarians and so on. so mostly these were active conservatives on campus. they had a reputation for being conservative, but through a chain referral methodology, i was also able to find some students who were more debehind the scenes. so this isn't totally about activist students on campus. i conducted 50 student and alumni interviews in all and supplemented by another 50 for 100 total with national conservative organization leaders, with faculty administrators and other folks. now demographically, on both campuses the students were -- as you might expect from reading pew research polls or looking at the general social survey -- most of these students were predominantly white. there were more men than women many our sample, and they were generally fairly religious. in the ran the gam miss from being -- exam mutt for very religious to spiritual but not religious, and we had a few agnostics and atheists in the group as well. generally, this is pairly religious bunch. and the majority of our interviewees were middle to upper middle class although eastern elites tended to come from families that were more highly educated and affluent than western families. that said though, our interviewees displayed quite extensive variants. we had a few students at western and eastern whose parents had graduated from college, one or two whose parents had only graduated from high school and advanced degrees as well. so in the final analysis, the two samples were not as different on social class background as one might think in studying an elite private university and a public university. so let me now get to our findings in the book. and in this presentation i'll focus on one of issues that i raised earlier about the presumed homogeneity of conservative college students across the country. and i'll do this in particular by drilling down on students' political styles on these two case study campuses. and when i talk about styles, i'm not talking just about students andal lumbars' stated ideological beliefs or the doctrines that they adhere to, but also their expressive practices in the service of those beliefs. and i do this because in our increasingly polarized national political environment and even within the republican party itself, we're seeing that the styles of politics is becoming, are becoming as important as the ideas of politics. insofar as particular styles can lead to animosity, gridlock, a lack of compromise. and i'll open my discussion of conservative college students' styles with a couple of vignettes from our data. so it is 2007, and is members of the college republicans at western flagship have just staged an event called the affirmative action bake sale. i know this is no stranger to you at berkeleyment now, the bake sale is a well known piece of political theater that conservative students use at many universities across the country selling cookies at a higher price to white students than they do to, say, african-american and latino students. the bake sale is said to highlight the insidious effects of race-based affirmative action. it has a point of view, but when students at western talk about what it's like to actually stage the event, it's clear that they revel in the sheer fun and confrontation that their activity stirs up. one interviewee said, so we're out there, and it's like five college republicans. and for about half an hour community members would come by and say, oh, i'm a white guy, and i've got pay a dollar. people are really getting into it. at this bake sale, which is not from western, prices were inflated. people were really getting into it. of course, peen while, there's a noontime rally organized by the diversity thugs, by which he means politically-correct groups like women or racial ethnic minorities. they've got hair bull horns out, they're rang angry, they've got their signs, and i have no problem with protesters, i want the protesters there. and another student said of events like it, be you wake up and come to school in the morning and someone calls you a bigot, you know you're going to have a good day. now, this kind of event is one of a fairly large number of actions that conservative students stage on college campuses alongside catching illegal alien day where one student is designated undocumented or illegal and others try to catch him, the global warming beach party where students talk the theory of climate change with beer and suntan oil x the conservativing coming-out day, a twist on lgbt presence on campus. and such events are promoted by national conservative organization which spend millions of dollars a year helping conservative students learn to be activists in what we are calling the provocative style. meanwhile,2,000 miles away at eastern elite, an event like the bake sale is considered verboten, not so much even by administrators and faculty who don't like them, but more so by conservative students themselves. at this private university, conservative undergraduates denounce confrontational actions just for the sake of pushing liberals' buttons. as one eastern student described it,: look, i don't think anything like that is helpful. what person walks up to a table to buy a cupcake and realizes that this is an affirmative action bake sale and then walks away thinking, wow, that was a great illustration of the problems with affirmative action. the only thing i've ever seen from events like that is divisiveness and lack of communication. others at eastern elite concur saying such an event would be unsuitable for the sensibility of their campus even while they're also ideologically anti anti-affirmative action. instead of provoking, they prefer to use what we call civilized discourse with which they attempt to engage liberals in discussions, they argue about ideas, sure, but with debate backed up by facts and research not through the flaming of both sides, or at least that the's the stated intent. we find that these two styles of conservativism pretty much are mutually exclusive. the provocative style almost never gets used as eastern, ask when it does, student groups learn not to use it again. i remember freshman year our posters would be like life starts at conception and ends at planned parenthood, and we'd have blood spatters, or we'd have a fetus developing, and the fetus would be saying different things like i want to be an airline pilot when we grow up. people hated them, i learned from that experience. this thing goes on to say that his pro-life group started different kinds of campaigns in light of this failture for baby -- failure for baby bottles, for pregnancy counseling, and ask that he worked across the aisle with what he referred to as the sometimes crazy women's center on campus. in other words, his pro-life group, many of his members had used tactics like when they were growing up, didn't like the controversy they were stirring up at eastern elite unlike at western where that was very much the point, and at eastern students dumped it for the civilized discourse style that is appropriate for their campus. at western, meanwhile, students told us they shunned this more respectful style because, quite frankly, it's not conservative enough, and it's lame. so the point of of these two dominant styles pretty much don't meet on these two campuses. however, there's more to this story. while each of these is the dominant form of expression on each campus, we found there are also two subordinate or submerged styles used by conservative students. no one style is completely monolithic on either campus. on both campuses, a smaller set of students say they were happy to engage in a campaigning style. hosting candidates as speakers, walking precincts and that a sort of thing. but this campaigning style comes under attack from other conservatives on both campuses. first, it's not used very much at all at western, and when it is used, it catches a lot of flak for being an abomination because it, quote, kisses the ass of the national gop. it's not expressive enough or fun enough. at eastern, meanwhile, the campaigning style comes under similar assault, but with more of an elitist flavor. for example, when a student says he is baffled as to why any of his highly talented classmates would want to come to a school like eastern and then spend their time working on phone banks, for heaven sake, it just seems so member yang activity. we can see even when students are rejecting a style, there's a unique campus meaning system behind it. finally, there are those at eastern who make use of our last category of conservative styles which we call the highbrow provocation style. and this thrives in the pages of the conservative newspaper at eastern, and it's a kind of pedigreed national review style consisting of ironic, sometimes philosophical and contemptuous essays about multiculturalism or gender sensitivity. now these issues that come under attack by highbrow provocateurs are not so different from what western public conservatives dislike, but the expression is very different. highbrow provocation is not activist where activism means going out on the quad and publicly riling people up with catch an illegal alien day. it's a lit tear arch style, think dinesh d'souza in his dartmouth review days. so just to summarize the set of find toings very quickly, at western public the provocative style is dominant, it's confrontational, it seeks fun, and the campaigning style is subordinate. a few students use it, but it's not seen to be appropriate for fun-loving college students who are conservative. at eastern elite, meanwhile, civilized discourse predominates , and both campaigning and this highbrow provocation style is subordinate. so what do we make of this uneven distribution of conservative styles across these two campuses, and should we even be surprised by these findings? perhaps this is all just a matter of selection effects. so eczema nation complete -- explanation complete whereby eastern elite students are simply more refined to begin with as they walk onto campus, and the civilized discourse style just makes sense to them. while at western conservatives come to campus ready to round -- rumble. it's a good hypothesis, but given the length of my presentation today, while we do see the impact of selection, it cannot, it cannot give us a complete understanding of what we're seeing on these campuses. for one thing demographically while eastern elite students as i mentioned earlier do tend to come from families who are more affluent and have more education in their backgrounds which pay be the origin of greater civility toward others, the students and alumni we interviewed at eastern were hardly all-schooled early on this gracious cosmopolitanism. indeed, many of them spoke of cosmopolitan effects they learned in many aspects of their lives once they arrived at school. in addition, like their peers at western, eastern students had done things like staged abortion protests and watched fox news, and they had visited the web sites of national key organizations -- conservative organizations that sponsored the provocative style, and yet we didn't see eastern students leaning in to this style as western students did. second in terms of whether we should be surprised by these findings, when we looked at students' conservative ideology or belief, we found that students on the two campuses were really quite similar in several ways, and i can go into a little more detail about this in q&a. but students of both eastern and western agree about the need for small government. they agree about the problems of the nanny state. they are advocating for low taxes, strong national security and even on social issues they're more or less in agreement. so it won't be unreasonable to expect that similarities in ideology would lead to similarities in styles, but they don't. another way that these differences are surprising is that these styles don't core respond to students' statements, a feeling like they're in the political minority on their respective campuses. interviewees on both campuses said quite clearly that being in the numerical minority introduces real hardships for them; isolation from peers, feeling like they're always having to defend their political views and also feeling like their politics are at odds with faculties' politics. yet despite this similarity and saying that they're in the minority, the styles that the two groups used are strikingly different. finally, a fourth reason our findings are intriguing, if i do say so myself, is that for the past couple of decades at least -- and there's debate over whether this style originated with the tea party or much earlier with gingrich or reagan or further back -- but there's clearly been a narrowing of conservative styles promoted by the national republican party. what we might call flash and burn tactics that look quite similar to what we saw being used at within. so the fact that a provocative style is this the the cultural air at the broadest lev of society in politics but is typical only of western, not eastern students requires explanation. so what is the story? i'm going to move through now a bit more data again before offering our cultural and organizational analysis of how universities matter for the development of students' conservative styles. now, interviewees at western gave us a variety of reasons for why they chose to be confrontational. virtually all of them said that confronting liberals is essential for dealing with a sense of marginalization that they feel on their campus. they refer to faculty transgressions that alienate them such as being singled out as the conservative girl who should offer the conservative perspective on some topic many class. -- in class. they talk about their peers' behavior, not listening to them or harassing their speakers, and they point to the overall liberal feel in the community where flagship is located. all of this gives the confrontational style legitimacy in their eyes. they have to fight back. interviewees also said the provocative style is about having fun, a kind of playing gotcha with liberals. as one student says, angry liberals tend to be conservative activists' bread and butter. i mean, college republicans will do silly, stupid stuff often very purposefully to get people's emotions to come out. .. for precisely what the college republicans on that campus were up 2. they were out to push buttons, speak out against them and make a point to those people as being the problem. on campus that is necessary to go big in order to get the attention with to this is from apathetic classmates who otherwise want to party or liberal activists who dismiss the conservative perspective. not only that but the media loved it when you introduce these events and said to potential political employers. one of our interviewers said if you can be perceived as somebody who brings a conservative message to evil western -- of the socialists up there you can have any job you want to. this interviewee is being hyperbolic when he refers to his evil socialist campus but he is also dead serious about the positive affects such rhetoric can have for him later. students have an eye on their future careers and if you want to get into politics which many of these students do, students perceive a confrontational style to be a boon for their career path. putting on my analytical hat here how does western public university culturally and organizationally incubate these students's taste for provocation. assuming they didn't just come to campus ready to go after liberals? the first thing that is important to note is western has a large state school where 25% of students live on campus and only a handful have been at dining halls. altogether 75% of students commute. what we know from the literature about these kinds of living patterns is that in colleges, people who are most like them on campus there is a strong pull towards similarity. if there are not university interventions in the form of political organizations or town halls or things of that sort this multiplies. what this means for conservatives is there are few opportunities for students of unlike mind to get to know one another. this organizational feature of the campus, contributes to real insularity. a week set of community norms for respectful political discussions and in turn there are fewer social constraints on provoking their peers and faculty. after all if you don't know any black students or latino students by name, that is easier to set up a sign selling cookies for $0.25 or suggesting they are illegal aliens. the first argument is the housing and dining features and other social features lead to other opportunities for building social capital across heterogeneous peer lines and this contributes to the prerogative. second confrontational, students at western also have much less personal contact with faculty with eastern students, as i said before there is of much larger student faculty ratio at western public. students take classes in largely lecture format and thirdly and importantly also you might not think about off the top of your head there is an impersonal lottery registration system for getting into courses in the first place and i was surprised in the interviews that i conducted to hear how much this is talked about. what i figured out was what it means is students often aren't getting into the classes they do want and end up in classes they don't and this personalized system presumably has alienating the facts on all students at western. for students on the right, already primed by national conservative organizations to regard the professors with mistrust. increases their level of suspicion about faculty and lowers the barriers to a confrontation. you don't know your professors, it is easy to caricature them as evil socialists. finally we find institutional -- culture or organizational saga. played a major role in how students understand themselves in the political realm. western is a party school. if you look at you as news and world report you see recreation being emphasized and we argue the provocative style of conservatism fits very well with students understanding campus as a fun place to be where college students are supposed to have fun. we don't want to play it safe while we are here. there's a sense among western conservative psychologists that they should play it big and set traps for the liberals which makes their conservative points work better on campus. organizational and cultural reasons, provocation dipped as well as the style for conservatives that western even when they share the same ideological tenets of their peers at eastern. what is the story at eastern? why is it important to conservative students to prevent their ideas in a civilized way and to appear respectful tapirs and professors and to answer this question i will refer to one more quote because it is quite telling. eastern college republican settle lot of the republicans whereas a lot of the republican message on other campuses is structured around big diagram again attention getting things, 60,000 students on campus who are more interested in the fraternity party at least in the we get students much different because people are willing to go to discussions seminar with an eminent academic. you don't have to be out protesting in order to get people's attention. one can see clearly that eastern students are aware of what other college students are doing on their campuses and what the student is saying is he and his classmates are free not to pursue populous ends. i adhere the student i am quoting was at the moment of our interview, special assistant to one of george w. bush's chief political strategists, taking of the semester off to work with a strategist who is listening to confrontation. you have to take my word on that because i can't say his name in this presentation. the student was working for the strategist and got into a more confrontational style for national politics when he was on campus, he argued that provocation would work there. one overarching rationale, we asked students about this, what they said was we engage in discussion and respect the exchange at eastern because this is eastern. we are part of the specialty of the community made of world-class faculty and highly talented classmates, and important now and important later, and we have the luxury and privilege of being responsible people in this context. also interesting that eastern interviewees, felt this to be an obligation. they are compelled to engage -- to not put evidence that would be -- make people feel uncomfortable and you think of the blood spatters on the pro-life posters i mentioned earlier which were immediately jettisoned. discomfort isn't good. being at ease is good. and students, discussion of the east that they teach their students, most students do not come to campus already perfectly educated in refinement, and they learn to be civil once they get to campus one way or the other in the system. they are taking on a collective eminence by being students at eastern. i should add the students at eastern have a fixed eye on their future careers but unlike students at western, eastern students are convinced with the types of futures they will be having, seeking clerkships, goldman sachs, heading up an affirmative-action bake sale isn't going to look so good on their resumes and they are very aware of this when they are in college. there is an institutional -- being in a special academic community that shapes conservatives's files but we see this cultural ethos being bolstered by organizational features of campus as well. the housing system and eastern keep students on campus all four years and in clusters that live with one another and the campus overall is much smaller than at western which means people know each other minimally, they feel more accountable to one another and communally and dining halls for years, the way students describe this is they live in an eastern elite bubble, self-contained social scene which we argue modulates conservative students willingness to go rogue all the students admitted would be fun. a lot of class size registration procedures that are more tailored to the individual students and other academic features like students's more personal relationships with faculty but you probably get the picture that organizationally, eastern looks different from western and that as a consequence of these cultural meetings and organizational arrangements eastern conservative students even when they say they suffer from large generalizations' still feel they are part of the university manufactured community. such a sense of community rules out for most conservatives the activist provocative style. despite a style that is vigorously promoted in gop politics use other campuss. let me wrap up. i want to emphasize that students at western and eastern reports were more similar in their styles at the time they entered college and at the time we interviewed them in two, three, four and more years in. many before entering college have written conservative blogs, certainly read them, attended protests and debated politics with their families and so on. it is also important to note, eastern students were more likely an aggregate to have a brand middle-class backgrounds which might translate to a case for more civil discourse style, and that both schools they came from families of varying cultural capital patterns so we are arguing against the positions that we are seeing campus knowledge reflecting pre college habits and arguing for the idea that campuses create pathways to conservatism. this is important in a couple ways. for one of the project helps us understand more about the lives of these students, how they think about themselves and conduct their activities and the variety of styles and dispositions among conservative students which we would note with more generalized media accounts or from critiques emanating from conservative organizations. second, the project helps us understand more about how college campuses act as incubators for certain kinds of political styles and not others. it has gone to that point, political styles are not just a reflection of individual choices but developed through shared culture in interaction with others in local settings as well as in dialogue with a broader cultural politics and styles. we learn from this research political mobilization is closely connected to the long-term professional projects that these students, the jobs they want and although i wasn't able to talk about this at wang in today's discussion these professional project are highly contingent on the party to the campus one goes to particularly thinking about national or regional politics. and politics, a career is, universities, stiles, discoursees have to be studied part and parcel with one another in an organizational context. finally the project gives us insight into conservative politics at large where the provocative style has gone a lot of play and leverage in today's republican party apparatus and that sound like such an understatement really. ideology, not star, has been a research focus of people studying conservatism. in the last couple years in the wake of the tea party more writers and commentators have done this but at the time we were conducting our work there was more attention to content than form but former shouldn't be overlooked. in today's world we are polarizing politics have been the currency, a grave mistake to ignore style. we would argue it is as serious domestic to ignore one of the key studies where political styles are fostered, on college campuseses. i will end and thank you for your attention. [applause] >> thank you, i think you stay here. is that right? and we will have questions from the audience, please. >> thank you very much. on campus, your intended, maybe three federalist society presentations at the law school, an odd combination, they are the minority but it is also a leader stephen though it is public service and stand out from the general crowd so not sure how but then you -- how to arrange the venue but more often than other groups in law school who organized eight or ten in the week, they always featured debate, and always the invitee is not a superconservative but just someone who might offer just for the conservative milk and then they will purposely have a stand in liberal response so it kind of crosses the boundary, the debate makes it confrontational potentially, people are very often on their best behavior and it is a mixture of all that. i wanted to point that out and as the second and west question. we talking about undergraduates, a research university and so the graduates are off some place else not doing either or what is going on with them? >> to your point about federalist society first if i may, i will say what the federalist society is engage in any civilized discourse. this discourse as we described in the book there's a lot of interest in engaging others in debate and having fantastic conversations, there is not an ad hominem quality to it. it is one of those intellectual organizations that i named early on which has done a lot of work mobilizing conservative jurists and law students and so forth so i would say that fits extremely well as the civilized discourse style. of very elite university, it makes sense that the university and law school, make sense that that would take place there i would think. your second question about graduate students, we had in our makes, undergrads, focused on undergraduates because so much of the conservative critique is about undergraduates. so really at the point that i was collecting data and doing their research, when i referred to i i didn't mean to be narcissistic, just accurate. i really wanted to focus on precisely the group the conservative critics and that journalist frequently talked about. and we didn't get a whole lot of information about graduate students. among our alumni there were several who were in law school at the time but i wouldn't be able to release speak to patterns among graduate students at these universities. >> fascinating discussion. i would think it was more important if you could draw some conclusions about whether the style of the conservative actions on campus extended past campus into graduation. to conservatives that come out of populist western universities, do they act differently after graduation in the political arena? >> i have not done that research. i have not looked -- tracing legislators or various others in public office, where they have come from but that would be a great project. one thing i know about their future is what they say about the jobs they want to get later. i said job aspirations were in a really important component to how these students were thinking about their politics on campus. if you were thinking that you would go into regional politics which a lot of western students said they were going to go into, this kind of mudslinging styles they thought would be quite useful to them whereas at eastern i found out most of these students were actually going into financing consulting, like so many other eastern students, liberal moderate or otherwise, and this kind of civilized style would be quite useful, various sorts -- working with people who have different perspectives. although i don't have the data on what these guys are like once they get into the larger society i can kind of think about what they might be like based on what they were talking about in terms of their future. >> thank you for the presentation. i was wondering what are the long-term implications of different styles of the conservative movement but i also wondered if you were able, hard to interview everybody but if you were able to see what the impact of the context were on liberal groups on the same campus? did you see similar forms on both campuseses? >> that is really important question. it could be all well and good about talking how conservatives respond to their campus but is this just the organizational and culture features, everybody on campus? and again, i didn't collect data on that, i could hear what conservatives set about their liberal tears. my conjecture on this is both campuses, these styles with the exception of the highbrow provocation style at eastern which is a library arts style that we would see much the same styles for liberal students as well because these organizational features, and the cultural ethos is so strong at these two schools but liberal students -- i would guess liberal students might not think about the purpose of their styles as much so western public the students thought about what it meant to be confrontational. i am in the minority. i have to do this so people recognize that i am here, i have to do this so not everybody thinks that only liberals go here and liberal students have that same sense of their place on campus. equally at eastern i would say students there, a liberal students don't have to play against that the weight conservative students do, they feel more comfortable on campus, and there in this collective m&m that we talked about. >> thanks for this great discussion. i wish i had access to your book when i was writing my dissertation. it would be useful. getting your thoughts about -- dovetails with what you were talking about. the victimization that is portrayed, being a numerical minority on campus, if they are the numerical minority, if that is as accurate as would be put out i am not sure about that but how does this happen? people perhaps that affiliated with the most powerful institutions and families and images are being victimized. >> i answered this question. in truth what are the numbers of students on campus, get those facts out. the higher education research institute looks it patterns across time in combination with our own interviews and fieldwork and we found that over time the percentage of liberals and conservatives hover around 20% or at least that is where we end up to date. this is very interesting. on campuses like eastern elite, the number of conservatives is again at 20% but relative to liberals, they are way out numbered. 50% of students, elite, private universities like this one consider themselves liberal and a smaller number considered themselves moderate whereas at a university like public, moderates and liberals are actually about the same number of liberals, the same number of conservatives and the vast majority, not the vast majority but 50% are moderate. all of this there is the argument that they are in the numeric minority. at least that western public, where they confrontational the present themselves they are about equal and i think the victimization, i talked to a few conservative critics who are concerned about this victimization stands but that is where so much of the national conservative discourse is made up of and you can see it is not mobilizing technique. you need us, come to our conferences, read our stuff, do the kinds of projects that are fun to do, get in people's faces, it is a more inviting kind of stance. less so the eastern elites turn their backs a little bit on the victimization because a profile, because they see what is coming. people like iman their campus and would rather think of themselves as also being highly honored, respected and so forth. >> do people who are fiscal conservatives and social liberals, do they identify as moderates, conservatives, what? how does that break down? >> i don't know in the national sample, they say they can't disentangle what people actually need in their issues, but students were also on the more libertarian side on social issues and fiscal policy. and they pretty neatly fit into these categories. there wasn't a big difference in terms of adopting the style on campus that their peers have adopted. does that answer your question? >> there isn't data. >> the national surveys, it is a very kind of crude measurement. how do you see yourself? very liberal? liberal? middle-of-the-road? conservative or very conservative? they haven't had conservative students in national surveys about distinction. i saw a hand up here? >> i find it interesting to point out conservative students who are minority on the campuses you describe engage in self victimization when that is something conservatives constantly accused people of color engaging in. i thought that was interesting. >> may i say something about that just off the bat? is it is indeed ironic. is also true -- maybe that is not needed but this is why some reflective conservatives are thinking about like we engage in this discourse of other people's victimization and yet we make so much pay out of the victimization and yet what the national organizations are doing is using that rhetoric, coopting that rhetoric and clearly stating this has been wrong fall whole time, really in the minority are conservative. >> in other words white males really got a raw deal in america. >> right. and on campus i didn't use this quote, but there is a quote from one of the people put on affirmative-action, western has 85% whites on campus, there were not a lot of minority students on this campus, underrepresented his students on this campus, and he said you come to campus and if you are black you can july in the african american club and other people are there for you but if you are a christian, white conservative male, you are in -- on your own. and that is his feeling on his campus. so this adoption of this discourse is quite profound and he believes it. this to my understanding of -- as i was talking to him, this was not let me silvie interviewer on this type of political argument. i feel like this on my campus. >> a real speech mentality when you are in the majority. another irony. i dealt with this in writing for geopolitical commentaries for quite a number of years. at uc-berkeley when they were included in the western model, it has been your analysis, i certainly sort of experience here at berkeley when for example in 1996 you had the opinion of the berkeley daily california student newspaper, matt baloney referred to potential black student recruits from l.a. as crack dealers and of course the college republicans brought the right winger david horowitz to campus at least twice. the first time i confronted him and sent him running with a question in which i subsequently had a commentary in the san francisco chronicle which took on his argument about reparations under the name joseph anderson in the san francisco chronicle. the second time, he talked about conservative students trying to push buttons. i dealt with him the first time quite adequately, i told in the public media, and online media, told liberals and progressive students don't go, ignore him, make him a non event which happened and he expressed disappointment that there weren't any liberals and conservatives there. went it was a situation when i am not writing formally, back in the day, my tactic was not to take the western-style conservative intellectual the seriously, i would take their side and parodied them against my progressive colleagues, comrades, whatever you want to say and that really flustered the conservative students. my question for you is if i could make three brief ones and you could answer them equally brief. one, this sort of catch an illegal alien day, that sounds pretty explicitly racist as opposed to the bake sale which might want to in directly say is racist, i don't know. i am wondering did that particular school have any speech code about racist speech? the other question is i have not seen the middle long time, and does this ultimately boil down to borrow and modify public enemy, does this boil down to fear of a black and brown planet? at least the university that i have been at at various times, one in the midwest, it is incredibly brown even when it is asian. so does this boil down to this is not my parents's university any more, all these people with all their cultures that they identify with and celebrate, this is threatening me as a sort of generic anglo white male especially. >> thank you very much. let me start with the first one, the last one first. sounds like what you are saying is what is being said about the tea party. there is too much change that is happening. we have a black president, all these undeserving people around. we want to take our country back. i am not sure i really see that on these campuses. these campuses are predominantly white. another one is in california. i will tell you that. there is not this kind of multicultural experience that we get in the california university system. so is not my sense that it is just racial politics or that it is for most racial. they really hate gender sensitivity. they really are concerned about national security and islam. they really despise taxes. it seems to me that is a more general choosing a hot-button issues in the western public campus, issues that can get people excited but those are not the only issues, punch and illegal alien day, affirmative-action. working backwards, in california, i had heard he was in neighborhood of you see san diego but not sure of that. i haven't met with him. in the book in a section where i needed to give a flavor of the provocation style, i couldn't quote directly from our interviewees from the conservative newspaper is because anybody with google could raise that and figure out which campus i was talking about so i use the description that they provided of his own early years coming the age and a provocation style, and was a dead ringer for what the students at eastern illegal talked about. catch an illegal alien day and speech codes, it is interesting to talk with conservatives about what happens when they staged these kind of events because this is where the real victimization discourse comes up again. when they staged an affirmative-action bake stale or catch an illegal alien they what they says is security comes out to protect the protesters. they are not protecting us. our cash registers are being flipped over and money is flying and people are hurling insults at us but what the administration does is protect the other side. there are norm's around speech at this university. these guys see that as a real problem. does that capture what you were getting at? >> why did the university come down on something that seems like pretty explicit racist speech whereas i wouldn't even call the bake sale racist perce. but you know. unless they had, i don't know, catch a slave cupcakes or something. i guess i am wondering where was the university, the vice chancellor on that kind of explicitly racist -- >> trying to remember the details of the last big event, it was at and why you so it was not at a public university. much ink was spilled and there was a lot of controversy about it. i don't think the university shut it down. it just kind of played out naturally but i could be wrong about that. >> thank you for a great presentation. my question is about your presentation, how does religion affects different styles? i am wondering if you talk to different diversity programs on those different campuses and how activism affects different things. >> in much the same way that we didn't find major differences in adoption among students who were fiscally conservative or socially conservative, we did see religious students and nonreligious students on each campus more or less adopted similar -- they fell into the style. that was typical of their campus, this was among women, this was in part because we studied women more carefully, we wrote a whole chapter on what we called conservative femininity. we doing is to -- interviews around the time, we were doing these interviews around the time that sarah palin was on the ticket so there is a lot of conversation about what it meant to be a conservative woman. really interested to come to understand to be a conservative woman is to be feminine, and to despise liberal feminism because liberal feminism is narrowing the opportunities for women and directing them more toward careerist than they would like to be. they are all planning on being career women but they follow feminism as closing off opportunities to choose other kinds of womanly endeavors and also saw liberal feminism as shutting down the opportunity to embrace a real femininity. we found that quite interesting. but these were -- that was the only population that we studied in isolation of others. >> how do they feel about sarah palin? >> the women love her. this is true at eastern elite and western. and they realized she was a flawed candidate, they didn't unlike that she lost and they didn't like that she couldn't say more profound things about russia and things of that sort but they did find her appealing. they found her outside the old network, they liked it that she brought this femininity to the 4 and they voted for her. >> last question. >> the people you interviewed were activists coming in to campus or becoming activists after their experience? >> we found both. we found a wide range of students pre college habits, some had been active in protests and one staged a fake bill o'reilly debate with friends of his in high school and so several of them came on to campus with their activism in hand. the pro-life group when they staged the action that featured the fetuses the students had been active as high school students and came onto campus, tried that and realize that wasn't the way and some of them had not been very active. some had not been active because they came from conservative communities and never had to think of their conservatism and once they got to this liberal universities they needed to express themselves as conservative as. >> a follow-up. the eastern model, pretty bombastic, not fitting the eastern model. >> i asked everyone of my interviewers about her. they didn't like her as much and saw her when they voted for john mccain they were voting for a ticket that contained sarah palin, the women resonated with her being a model for what it is like to be a conservative woman and having it all, family, career, success and so forth. not all of them agreed with the way she conducted herself and certainly the way she talked about the issues but they did resonate with the fact of sarah palin. >> one more. >> any students who were initially considered -- conservative influence the liberal environment. >> another good question. we found most of these students came in thinking of themselves as generically republican or conservative although there were a few that had moved toward greater conservatism but we also found that in college students further refined how they referred to themselves as conservatives so people who initially identified as republican or conservative then became fiscal conservatives or catholic conservatives. one of our interviewees, thinking of one person in particular referred to herself as the crunchy conservative. she is very pro-life but she is pro environment, pro social justice, some other ways. so things get messier once

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