Title: History Shows Student Protests Can Affect National Politics | Time
Headings: How Campus Protests Can Affect National Politics
How Campus Protests Can Affect National Politics
Historians explain how the past informs the present
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Content: They got something else too: a change to the mission of higher education. In response to the protests, colleges in the 1970s decided that their mission was not simply to study and teach about the world around them, but to create an environment free of racism, sexism and homophobia, and to promote of certain ideas of justice and progress. The script for today’s demonstrations reveals that students have been thoroughly indoctrinated in that post-1970s concept, and that they believe more work along those lines needs to be done. A modern protest usually begins with reported incidents of prejudice on campus. Students respond, not so much against the perpetrators but against the administration for failing to create a sufficiently safe environment. If the university is less than sufficiently responsive, the demands escalate to include requests for administrators to be fired. And now, at schools with high-level football or basketball programs like Missouri’s, players may threaten to boycott games. Sometimes today’s demonstrators get what they want—Missouri’s president stepped down—and, even more often, various steps are taken to re-educate the student population about the virtues of tolerance. At first glance, it’s easy to think that this link between the protests of the Vietnam era and those of today mean that the demonstrators are winning.