US Colleges stay conservative

so I'm reading 1968: The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky, and Kurlansky said that while we think of College in the US as generally left wing and progressive in their views that wasn't the case before the late 1960s that before that they were generally conservative cold warriors in their political out look, so A. is that true? B. what POD could lead to that being true through to today and C. how would a largely conservative academia in the US from 1966 to today change the US's history and culture?
 
Pretty difficult, if you ask me. You'd have to avoid all the cultural conflicts of the '60s and all the counterculture movements, which is a huge can of worms that is very, very hard to open (almost impossible IMO, although I bet there's some way to do it).
 
Avoid the GI Bill. In fact, go even further and make colleges much more legacy-based than meritocratic. Even then you have to tilt the U.S. as a whole to the left economically so the term conservative is about centrist IOTL.
 
The Draft and Deferments

Do away with the draft, or (simpler) don't give deferments based on college attendence. This, more than any other single factor, led to the massive increase in college attendence during the 1960s, in particular, the long term attendence of students avoiding the draft. Self-selection contributed to a generally anti-war mood on campuses, and this in turn acted as a 'gateway' to a generally leftist bend for many campuses.

Now it should be clear that there are a host of other factors at work. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, the growth of federal funding, etc. all were important contributors, as was the deliberate choice of many on the left to begin their 'long march through the institutions' with the universities. But the draft/deferment dynamic was key...
 
so I'm reading 1968: The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky, and Kurlansky said that while we think of College in the US as generally left wing and progressive in their views that wasn't the case before the late 1960s that before that they were generally conservative cold warriors in their political out look, so A. is that true? B. what POD could lead to that being true through to today and C. how would a largely conservative academia in the US from 1966 to today change the US's history and culture?
That's not true, at all. I think the New Deal and the GI bill changed it, the colleges were already liberal by the '60s.

Avoid the GI Bill. In fact, go even further and make colleges much more legacy-based than meritocratic. Even then you have to tilt the U.S. as a whole to the left economically so the term conservative is about centrist IOTL.

THIS.
 

Thande

Donor
I don't know, I mean the idea of university students as radical rabble-rousers (which is generally synonymous with left-wing ideals) predates the existence of the USA by centuries...I have a hard time believing American universities were ever all that conservative.
 
I don't know, I mean the idea of university students as radical rabble-rousers (which is generally synonymous with left-wing ideals) predates the existence of the USA by centuries...I have a hard time believing American universities were ever all that conservative.

Well, universities were the only place not monasteries where learning went on. So obviously, they were controversial in their anti-Church beliefs, as they were against the church.

American Universities were dominated by the rich and the legacies, until the New Deal. But they weren't exactly intellectuals.
 

Thande

Donor
Well, universities were the only place not monasteries where learning went on. So obviously, they were controversial in their anti-Church beliefs, as they were against the church.

That's a bit of a simplification given most universities historically focused on divinity. It's more just that if you get a lot of young people together in a place with a lot of drink, sooner or later they start rabble-rousing, and if they are intelligent and well-read due to being students, they will start bringing ideology and philosophy into it.
 

Nebogipfel

Monthly Donor
I would assume that as long as the majority of the students has a
(upper) middle class background, the universities naturally are rather
conservative(ish), as these strata of society usually are (I know, thats a simplification).

As soon as the universities start to equilibrate with the whole society - regardless of the actual reason), the political climate would logically shift towards the left.

The same seems to have happened all over the place, not only in the US. OTOH, anyone aware of exceptions - are there any countries where universities are conservative strongholds ?
 
I can only really think in any depth about US universities, based on personal experience. The major shift in ideological orientation came in the humanities, starting in the 1960s, accelerating with the development of the "New Left" in the mid- to late-1960s. There were plenty of cultural vectors pushing university culture to the left at that point, but the biggest accelerator, IMO, was the anti-war movement.

In order to at least put the brakes on that process a little bit, one would have to make significant changes in the course of the Vietnam War, either getting the US largely out of the conflict before c. 1966 or so, or somehow creating the conditions for a major escalation of the effort and changes in basic military policy by then and certainly by no later than Tet in '68.

In terms of what happens after that, you'd have to see some kind of invigoration of non-leftist political culture on a broader front earlier than it happened in OTL in order to produce influences on university culture in time to at least partially offset the generational impact that the students of the New Left had as they entered their faculty years in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.

Although I think it's not well understood by folks on the left in the US, one of the big amplifiers of the "culture wars" in the US was the impact that the New Left students had as they entered into faculty positions in US universities. Although there were inklings of a cultural reaction from the right before this, it was when the young academics whose background was experience as undergraduates in the New Left period started to have influence in academia that really got the attention of writers and other "culture workers" on the right in the US.

So, to develop an answer to the OP question for trends in the late 1970s and especially in the 1980s, one would have to imagine some kind of intellectual and cultural "seedbed" for the right at an earlier period, that would generate its own cohort of academics to enter the university as faculty during that period. In OTL, the right has been unsuccessfully playing "catch-up" on this score since the late 1970s. To have a different outcome, you have to give them a better head start in generating their own "bench" at an earlier time.
 
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