ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the Right has manufactured the attack on liberalized higher education by means of a right-wing apparatus dedicated to making radical cultural change. Making radical cultural change is essential to a conservative movement determined to impose its vision of America. Cultural conservatism's agenda is to reform the institutions responsible for transmitting Western culture, those that another group of conservative theorists have called mediating structures: families, schools, churches, neighborhoods, labor unions, professional associations, business, service organizations, and the media. In the mid-1980s, conservative foundations put their resources behind the shift to cultural and academic change. The systems are think tanks, training programs, foundations, grassroots organizations, and legal centers. The chapter also shows that cultural conservatives have used think tanks to produce the "expert" knowledge they could not generate from within the academy. The think tanks have constituted an "academicized" aura of authority upon which conservatives have capitalized to advance their political agenda.
