Five Lessons from Historians About Student Protests

A mini retrospective

While watching campus protests unfold this week, both around the country and close to where I live in Upper Manhattan, I read back through our interviews relating to protests led by young people — from Tuskegee and Columbia in the ‘60s to the mass movements of the 2010s. A handful of lessons stuck out illuminating why college campuses are often the site of uprisings and crackdowns, the growing disproportionality of violence at schools, and more.

I pulled some excerpts together below, which I hope you’ll find helpful. Paying subscribers can listen in audio form, too:

This mini-retrospective features excerpts from interviews with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, Vincent Bevins, and Dr. Brian Jones

Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Last week, I spoke with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd about crackdowns on students. She’s the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, where she traces the history of conservative forces on college campuses.

One point Dr. Shepherd emphasizes: the violence campus administrations and police departments have unleashed on students has grown, even though protests have been more peaceful.

Ben: Something that stands out to me is how violent protests in the `60s and `70s were compared to today.

To cite some information from your book, throughout September and October 1968, activists bombed war-related spaces at or near universities on a nearly daily basis. Over 4,000 bombs exploded on college campuses between January 1st, 1969 and April 15th, 1970. And in the one week following the Kent State shooting on May 4th, 1970, over a million students protested at over a thousand colleges, and 169 bombs exploded on university grounds.

Those actions seem pretty aggressive when compared to students in tents.

LLS: Yes, who’ve been peacefully in encampments.

Ben: There's only so much violence that can be conducted in a pair of Birkenstocks, both physically and spiritually —

LLS: — until the police get called in.

To me, speaking in April of 2024, it seems administrators are more willing to call in the police pretty quickly — whereas, in the `60s, they were a little bit more hesitant. After seeing the police-led violence at Columbia, many university presidents retired in the following years. They were just like, we don't want to deal with this. We would rather retire and not have blood on our hands.

Campus responses grew more violent after Kent State. Administrators and municipal leaders worried that local city police wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer volume of protests that broke out on campuses nationwide. They deputized campus security guards, in many places turning them into police officers who can arrest, tase, and shoot you.

Another major distinction in levels of violence is rhetorical violence. In the `60s and `70s, students were calling to overthrow the U.S. government. There may be calls for that today, but they aren't really dominating the discourse. Instead, what are the student demands today? They're asking for things like universities to divest their endowments. They're calling for just a ceasefire, right?

Another dynamic Dr. Shepherd calls out: administrators have often been more interested in students showing up to class than employing what they’ve learned in class.

Ben: In your book, you cite the historian Nancy MacLean. She explains that the aim of conservatives was and remains “to turn state universities into dissent-free suppliers of trained labor.” What does she mean?