What The History Of Student Protests Can Teach Us About Today

In recent weeks, students at colleges and universities across the United States have taken part in protests against the Israel-Hamas war. The United States has had a long and storied history of student activism, the earliest accounts of which can be traced to the American Revolution.

“We have complaints about harsh grading, we have complaints about dining hall food, we have complaints about living conditions on the campus, which lead to not just protests, not just occupations, but actual rioting in the period around the American Revolution,” explained Professor Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism at Hostos Community College in New York.

Johnston joined LAist's daily news program AirTalk, which airs on 89.3 FM, to explain how student protests of the past can inform our understanding of the ones going on across the U.S. today.

How Vietnam War protests shaped student activism

As the concept of the modern university developed in the 20th century, so did student activism.

By the 1960s, students adopted more radical approaches to protests. A consequence of this was that colleges responded with harsher crackdowns that often involved law enforcement. Clashes between students and law enforcement came to a head during the Vietnam War protests.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed anti-war student protesters at Kent State University. The Kent State Shootings garnered national attention and would be one of four incidents that resulted in student deaths between 1968 and 1970, Johnston said.

Police arrest student during riots against closure of "People's Park" on June 3, 1969 in Berkeley.

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The others were the Orangeburg Massacre at South Carolina State College in 1968, the People’s Park Protest at Berkeley in 1969, and the Jackson State Killings at Jackson State College in 1970.

Evolution of campus response

The violence of the Vietnam War protests forced college and university administrators and government officials to reconsider how they responded to student activism. In 1970, President Richard Nixon commissioned The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest.

“One of their conclusions was that a nation that is driven to use the weapons of war against its children, as the United States was doing on American campuses at that time, is a nation on the brink of chaos,” said Johnston.

Following the release of this report, college administrators began to negotiate with students, agree to concessions and became hesitant to send in law enforcement.

Johnston says the ratification of the 26th Amendment in 1971, which changed the voting age from 21 to 18, also impacted the dynamics of student activism as they related to state politics.

“Suddenly, students have for the first time the ability to organize and lobby within the electoral system around their own interests, particularly at public colleges and universities, which are governed in large part by the governor and the state legislature.”

In turn, he said, students had more power on campus in the 1970s and 1980s. This meant fewer arrests and more productive protests.

Johnston said he believes what is happening now is a result of backsliding from the policies that had been implemented in the last third of the 20th century.

The trouble with comparing protests then and now

On social media and in the press, people have been quick to draw comparisons between student activism during various points of history and today, especially as it relates to the anti-apartheid movement.

Johnston said protests today generally have demands that can be divided in three categories: Divestment, disentanglement from contractual relationships, and transparency. The demands of protesters, he added, are similar to demands during the anti-apartheid movement. But at the same time, that public memory of the anti-apartheid movement does not paint the full picture.

American students at the University of Maryland protest against US President Richard Nixon's decision to send US troops to Cambodia, in Riverdale, May 5, 1970. The Vietnam war opposed from 1955 to 1975, North Vietnam, supported by both China and USSR, and the South Vietnam, supported by the U.S. and greatly impacted Laos and Cambodia. Opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war began with demonstrations on college campuses in 1965 and grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years, as US casualties grew bigger every day while army's abuses were widely reported in the media.

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“There is a level of unanimity that we tend to ascribe to the past that isn’t always there.”

The public memory that anti-apartheid movement on campus arose during Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment, alongside a "wave of international opposition” in the 1980s, is an oversimplification, according to Johnston. He said students were protesting against apartheid in South Africa on campus as early as the 1950s with the divestment movement emerging in 1976.

Johnston said a lot of people have been asking him if he thinks this wave of protests will be successful, and whether protesters' demands will be met.

“I would say that there are some issues that may be won on a few campuses in the short term. I suspect that a lot of these students understand that they're in for the long haul.”

Listen to the conversation