Conservatives and Universities

MONDAY February 28th

BLUMER ROOM – 402 BARROWS HALL

2:00-3:30pm

The Berkeley Sociology Colloquium Series

Spring 2011 Presents:

The Institutional Making of the Modern Day Conservative:How Universities Influence Right-Leaning Styles

Amy Binder

Department of Sociology

University of California, San Diego

College plays a critical role in establishing and elaborating the worldviews and public performances of political actors. But while scholars know a good deal about progressive politics on campus, they know considerably less about college student conservatism. This paper compares the political styles of conservative students in two university systems—Eastern Elite University and Western Public University—and finds them to be markedly different. The authors locate the experiences of politically active conservative college students in a number of organizational structures, each of which provides additional layers of meaning to students’ unfolding political sensibilities. We find that students are active agents in their cultivation of political styles, but that they are also enabled and constrained in their individual proclivities by the organizational resources and cultural repertoires available to them on their campuses. We argue that styles of campus conservatism are much more than the result of “natural inclinations” that students bring with them to college—a simple mirror of students’ social class origins or early political expression. Rather, we contend that these dispositions are developed on campus—they are organizational products, which are built up through multiple interactions of shared culture.

Amy Binder is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California San Diego and a 2010-2011 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Her primary areas of research are in the sociology of culture, education, social movements, and organizations. She is co-authoring Creating Conservatism: How Campuses Shape Political Discourse and Style with Kate Wood, a graduate student at UC San Diego