UC-Berkeley Hosting Conference on ‘Right Wing Studies’
“We do not have a political agenda”
This looks like it’s going to be nothing more than an effort to smear conservatives. A key player here has ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Campus Reform reports:
Berkeley hosts Conference on Right Wing Studies…but it doesn’t seem so right-wing
The University of California, Berkeley is hosting a Right-Wing Studies Conference, hosted by the Center for Right-Wing Studies (CRWS), which was founded during the rise of the conservative Tea Party in 2009 and has been around since.
The CRWS is hosting its inaugural Conference on Right Wing Studies April 25-27. The event is featuring scholars “whose work deals with the Right as a social, political, and/or intellectual phenomenon from the 19th century to the present day.” As the name implies, the center studies right-wing movements both in the United States and abroad, and has held events on topics including, but not limited to, historical and present-day American conservatism, Christianity and the Religious Right, and European populist movements.
Lawrence Rosenthal, a long time faculty member at Berkeley and Fulbright award winner, is the chair and lead researcher of Berkeley’s CRWS. Rosenthal told the Daily Californian in May 2018 that the center does not receive any funding from the University and is funded entirely by private donations.
The academic coordinator for the CRWS is Dr. Christine Trost. Trost’s bio on the CRWS website lists numerous roles that she has held in the past, including a position on the Academic Advisory Board of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
The SPLC has targeted several of today’s prominent conservatives, including Campus Reform’s own former program manager Hannah Scherlacher, who was on an SPLC Watch List in 2017. Trost holds positions with both the CWRS and Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI). Yet, Trost told the Daily Californian that the CWRS is “not a political organization.”
“We do not have a political agenda,” Trost said. “Our mission is scholarship.”
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