Mobilizing on Campus: Conservative Movements and Today’s College Students1

Social movement scholars have known for some time that students, and particularly college students, play an important role in modern social movements. Yet the full extent of conservative mobilizing, both today and in the past, is frequently overlooked. This article highlights the critical role college campuses have played in the rise of conservative movements in the United States over the last 40 years. In doing so, it develops a concept of transition points to help explain the mechanisms responsible for the longstanding finding that college students form an important core of many social movements. Transition points are marked by both changes in routines and changes in social network configuration. The utility of the transition point concept is explored through ethnographic and interview data from the American pro‐life movement.