The Other Side of Campus

Indiana University's Student Right and the Rise of National Conservatism

Jason S. Lantzer

On a brisk spring day in March 1965, an estimated 300 Indiana University students assembled in Dunn Meadow, the green oasis beside the Indiana Memorial Union where students often relaxed between classes or met to play games. This day was different, however, as these students gathered not to enjoy the atmosphere, but to speak their minds about the war in Vietnam. They carried signs, chanted slogans, and generally behaved, according to the campus newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student (IDS), in a manner not unlike that of an additional 650 students and locals who had also assembled in the meadow to hear speeches about the civil rights movement in the wake of the recent march on Selma, Alabama.1	1
This convergence of civil rights and Vietnam demonstrations may sound like a typical episode of 1960s campus activism, but it was not. A good half of the students attending the Vietnam rally marched in support of the United States' commitment to halting the advance of communism in Southeast Asia. While such a show of support was hardly uncommon, either at IU or at other college campuses nationwide, subsequent studies of 1960s campus activism have tended to inherit from government investigators of the period a tendency to define student protest as the purview of the Left.2 Though a growing body of recent scholarship has challenged these kinds of assumptions about the period, recent discussion, some of it appearing in the pages of the Indiana Magazine of History, has focused almost exclusively on the Left.3	2
"It's guys like you who give this campus a bad name." Contrary to traditional depictions of the 1960s, IU students on the Right and Left actively engaged each other during that tumultuous decade. Indiana Daily Student, October 7, 1967
Obviously, this focus reveals only part of the story. An investigation of the campus activism of the 1960s and 1970s should consider the full range of student expression evoked by the complexity of those times. Far from exhibiting what Richard Hofstadter deemed the "paranoid style" of many conservative American movements (complete with persecution complex and void of relevant ideas), the campus Right at IU and elsewhere provided a number of students with an alternative and highly attractive worldview, one that both defended and critiqued the status quo.4 The New Right's conservative ideology, like that of the radical Left, stood at odds with the consensus "me-too-ism" of the 1950s, which joined Democratic and Republican elites in agreement on certain foreign and domestic policy essentials. This study draws on contemporary IU sources and on more recent interviews with several of the era's participants to locate conservative activists in a variety of organizations that interacted with each other and with their liberal rivals to challenge and change campus, national, and international issues.5 Though often viewed as an enigma by consensus liberals and neglected by commentators, the Right's ideas prompted a generation of activists who would, like their more widely recognized counterparts on the Left, recall their campus experiences as the cornerstone of an effective effort to reshape American politics and culture in the decades ahead.6	. . .