It’s been a minute since I’ve done a Friday Fragments piece, but now that I’m publishing on Fridays, it seems a shame not to dust it off. So, here goes.
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As a political theorist who works in higher ed administration, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me until last month to get around to Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s excellent book Resistance from the Right. In a way, though, the delay helped.
Lassabe Shepherd outlines the rise of right-wing organizations on college campuses in the U.S. in the 1960s. That’s an unusual choice in its own right; most accounts of the 60s focus on the New Left, and most accounts of the rise of the right don’t focus on higher ed.
Hearing it now—I listened to it as an audiobook while driving, so I don’t have quotes at the ready—I was struck by several threads. The first was just how thoroughly intentional more established conservative figures were in seeding campus organizations. Students with conservative leanings were funded, groomed, trained and recruited with an efficiency that the leaderless New Left simply didn’t have. Prominent conservatives funded campus newspapers and radio stations that gave up-and-coming young conservatives platforms that their left or liberal counterparts couldn’t rival. The right was playing the long game, and it paid off.
As a theorist, too, I appreciated Lassabe Shepherd’s attention to the persistent tensions between the “traditionalist” and libertarian streaks within the right. In the context of a military draft, for instance, the two camps disagreed so fundamentally that organizations like Young Americans for Freedom had schisms, effectively banning one side (in their case, the libertarians) from the group entirely.
The most striking resonance, though, came from listening in 2025, as opposed to when it was published in 2023. The book offers a series of accounts of right-wing groups attacking college presidents and/or trustees for being insufficiently harsh on left-wing student protesters. In the wake of the Gaza protests of the last couple of years, the observation “hit different,” as the young say. And even in the moments when conservative organizations weren’t calling for vengeance, they were actively trying to narrow down colleges’ missions to vocational preparation, preferably with students bearing most of the cost. The idea was to use economic power to enforce political discipline. Lewis Powell himself—later to join the Supreme Court—made the connection explicit. It was a conscious strategy.
It’s one thing to suspect as much. It’s another to get empirical confirmation.
Lassabe Shepherd also hosts a terrific podcast, American Campus, that has quickly become a favorite. But I really can’t recommend her book highly enough.
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Thanks to the readers who wrote in with responses to the piece about hiring late-career professionals in technical fields as adjuncts as part of a glide path to retirement. Several readers noted that this was, in fact, the original vision of “adjunct” faculty: people with industry expertise who could offer a real-world complement to theory. Over time, the economic appeal of adjuncts to institutions led to expanding the category far beyond what it was intended to cover.
There’s truth in that. In a job interview once, a professor asked me what my ideal adjunct percentage was. I replied something like “lower than it usually is now, but not zero.” The role can make sense in some cases. For example, when I was at the County College of Morris, it had a large and well-respected music program. (That’s still true.) Music majors had to have a primary instrument and a secondary one, one of which had to be piano. We could never realistically have a full-time professor for every major instrument. But being close-ish to New York City, we could draw on professional musicians as adjuncts. Given that most professional gigs are at night, daytime sections of lessons were fairly easy to staff. In that specific case, the model worked well. And I’ve seen it work with, say, working attorneys hired to teach a business law class on the side. In those cases, the appeal wasn’t simply cheap labor.
A few other readers pointed out the need to provide serious pedagogical training for anyone picking up teaching as a late-career shift. (One reader made a distinction between the soon-to-retire and the retired; given the speed of technological change in many fields, folks who’ve been retired for a while may not be up-to-speed in the field anymore.) That’s obviously true, and something that we should be doing anyway. Many community colleges have variations on “centers for teaching and learning” that provide some of that, and some have formal mentoring programs as well. That said, I’ve also worked as an adjunct in places where the formal training consisted of showing me where to pick up my mail and where to get copies made. I hope things are better now, but I suspect the improvements are uneven across the industry.
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Thanks, too, to the folks who wrote in about dual enrollment and its economic impact on community colleges. I was especially struck by a note from a college president I know who mentioned that she’s in the midst of a reduction in force caused by the economic consequences of dual enrollment. That’s rough. Honestly, I would rather have been wrong.
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Some parents bond with their adult children over celebrity gossip, sports fandom or recipes. We do that too, but with a distinctly academic variation.
The Girl and I recently spent a lovely hour or so rehashing and relishing the midcentury literary tiff between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison.
I’ll take it.
Even better, she has her own distinct perspective on it, which she can back up with citations.
As an academic Dad, I couldn’t be prouder.
