For better or worse (it’s worse), so much of American political discourse is fixated on college campuses. Major news programs fixate on personnel scandals at a handful of (prestigious) schools; debates over affirmative action and legacy admissions consume editorial boards across the nation (even though most colleges take most applicants and vanishingly few have any legacy policies to speak of); multiple Republican presidential candidates have made the (manufactured) crisis of free speech on campuses the centerpiece of their campaigns; an entire protofascist parental movement has emerged in opposition to “critical race theory,” which until quite recently was simply the subspecialty of a smattering of obscure academics.

To the extent this state of affairs represents a break from the past, it’s a difference of degree but not kind. Today’s overheated debates about “wokeness” and diversity and equity initiatives were yesterday’s freakouts about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces.” The fights over “political correctness” on campus go back to at least the 1980s, deplatforming to at least the 1970s. Politicians have been whining about whining students for decades. Elders have been decrying the young as insufficiently respectful of tradition since time immemorial. The bizarre collegiate focus of politics, in other words, is nothing new.

Yet according to the historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, something did change in the late 1960s. At a time usually associated with leftist protest and explosions (figurative and literal) of radical potential, conservatives on campus began organizing. Out of their efforts emerged not merely a collection of now-familiar Republican luminaries — Newt Gingrich, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Karl Rove — but a novel set of tactics and a distinctly authoritarian sensibility.