Becoming Right, a recent book by the sociologists Amy Binder and Kate Wood, bills itself as the first truly scholarly study of conservative college students. Binder, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego, and Wood, her Ph.D. student, undertook the study because very little had been written about this particular demographic. Many social scientists have written about campus liberalism—from Freedom Summer to From Black Power—but the only previously available literature about campus conservatism was either journalistic or polemical, like William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale and similar works by Dinesh D’Souza and David Horowitz. To Binder and Wood, “these anecdotal forays into the conservative student phenomenon are hardly disinterested social scientific studies.”

The authors wrote Becoming Right to fill that gap. In studying today’s conservative students, “we wanted to know whether they felt they were in a political minority on their campus, as the critics [like Buckley] contend; whether they were upset about their peers, faculty, and administrators; and what they did about it if they were.” They examined “what the turning points had been” in students’ beliefs and “what forms of conservative activism they engaged in while in college.”

To answer these questions, they conducted in-depth interviews with conservative undergraduates and alumni of two American universities. The schools made Binder and Wood keep their names hidden, and are referred to only as “Western Public” and “Eastern Elite.” Western Public is a big state