A major theme in the modern conservative movement has been its attack on elites, university elites in particular. William Buckley famously remarked that he would “rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” When Ronald Reagan was first elected governor of California, one of his major campaign themes was to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” George W. Bush decried the “intellectual arrogance” of his undergraduate alma mater, Yale University. More recently, conservative activists like David Horowitz wrote a book called the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

But Tuesday’s election hinted that the relationship between conservatives and elite universities might be changing. Congress is now home to a group of Republicans who not only went to Ivy League Schools but also flaunted this credential during their campaigns. In upstate New York, Elise Stefanik became the youngest woman elected to Congress after running ads that noted she “graduated from Harvard University.” Tom Cotton won a Senate seat in Arkansas after flogging his Harvard degrees so much that his opponent complained he had “used Harvard to further his political career.” Ben Sasse—a graduate of Harvard with a Ph.D. from Yale and the author of a TEDx talk on higher education in the past year—won a Senate seat in Nebraska.

America’s universities became more politically liberal in the decades after World War II, culminating in the liberal 1960’s. Conservatives initially responded in the 1970s and 1980s by creating an alternative university structure for those on the political right—not only to educate students but also to network them into power. Jerry Falwell created Liberty University in 1971 and Pat Robertson created Regent University in 1978. When George W. Bush became president, he filled many important positions in his administration with Liberty and Regent graduates.

But Republicans did not withdraw from elite universities entirely. In fact, they were trying to carve out their own spaces within them. Centers like the Hoover Institution at Stanford University remained major hubs of conservative thought, particularly on economic policy. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law School, and helped launch the modern conservative legal movement.

Slowly, elite universities became more conservative—even if in relatively small numbers. These schools started to realize that conservative perspectives needed to be represented in higher education. As Alan Brinkley, a former provost at Columbia, once wrote: “[I]t would be hard to argue that the American Right has received anything like the amount of attention from historians that its role in twentieth-century politics and culture suggests it should.” Law schools hired scholars who argued that the Constitution should be interpreted according to what it meant at the time it was drafted, a position that the Republican Party has embraced. Economics departments, which tend to be relatively conservative, rose in prominence in universities.

