Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY-SA 2.0

The death of Charlie Kirk has made me think about the growth of the right-wing presence on U.S. campuses during the last three decades. The student right during these years morphed from Ronald Reagan boosters into the neo-Fascist Christian Nationalists of Turning Point, USA. Yet, one of the major reasons for the success of Charlie Kirk and his roadshow was the weakness of the campus left. Another was the financial and political backing from the rich and powerful from its very founding, despite its origin mythology of starting out in Kirk’s family’s garage.

Scanning through many articles documenting the growth of Kirk’s “nonprofit” foundation during the past decade is like watching a well-capitalized media start-up with aspirations to become a global player. Turning Point’s IRS tax return reported, for example, that it had revenues over $86 million 2024. Kirk received a salary of over $285,000 and another $99,000 in compensation. Not huge in corporate terms but for students politics this was unprecedented. This gushy video tour of Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona in 2019 gives an idea of the burgeoning confidence of Kirk and his entourage.

The Post-Sixties Campus

Whether you date the decline of the campus left in the waning years of the Vietnam War or in the decade that followed, when the New Left turned to working class, it was pretty clear by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the right began to build a significant presence on college campuses. Not everywhere at once, of course, it was a herky-jerky process. The Republican Party, however, took building their campus operations far more seriously than the Democrats, who from my perspective appeared virtually non-existent, disorganized, and had little political appeal.

The Republicans drew many of their future leading cadres from battles within the College Republicans and against the student left, liberal faculty members, and administrators. Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, for example, future Republican presidential campaign managers and advisors, first cut their teeth in College Republican politics in the 1970s. On campuses previously known for their liberalism and radicalism, typical of the media coverage of time was a New York Times article from 1984, “Students Leaning to the Right”:

In his freshman year at Princeton University, Peter Heinecke joined a campus organization so low key that hardly anyone knew it existed. It was the Princeton University College Republicans. ”It was pretty much a dead thing,” Mr. Heinecke recalled. So much so, in fact, that nobody even bothered to renew the club’s registration with the Dean’s Office. That was last year.

This year, in the flush of President Reagan’s re-election victory, the College Republicans is very much alive. Membership has grown from a mere handful of students a year ago to 200, with double that on the mailing list. As unusual as the conservative trend might seem at Princeton – a traditionally liberal school – it is hardly an isolated example. On campuses across the nation, students are increasingly becoming aligned with the Republican Party.

The College Republicans were joined in their efforts by local initiatives that gained a national following such as the Dartmouth Review founded at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1980. Anti-apartheid activists built “shanty towns” on the Dartmouth campus to highlight the racial oppression and poverty of the Black majority in South Africa in 1986. Calling themselves the Dartmouth Committee to Beautify the Green Before Winter Carnival, twelve Dartmouth students—ten of whom were on the staff of the Dartmouth Review—attacked and destroyed the shanties with sledgehammers on Martin Luther King Day. According to New York Times:

But the shanty episode is only the latest part of a long campaign by........

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