Higher education students in the U.S. have played instrumental roles in protesting war and social injustice since at least the 1950s, planning and participating in marches for causes such as civil rights, Free Speech, and against the Vietnam War. In more recent years, university students have been active in movements like #MeToo, BLM, and No Kings, as well as anti-ICE protests and marches. Many of these earlier movements led to tangible policy change — consider, for example, the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee’s role in organizing the Freedom Rides of 1961, which helped in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the lowering of the voting age to 18 in response to intensifying pressures from Vietnam War protests.
Sixty years ago, when voting rights were still being set and amended, the student protests during the Greensboro sit-ins were effective, acting as the “impetus for the larger sit-in movement that spread across the country.” These protests in North Carolina were poorly received by police, but they raised enough awareness and attention that the Democratic National Convention noticed them. Freedom Summer was not universally successful, but it nevertheless helped push President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, recent student protests are considerably less effective than they used to be. According to The American Prospect, there were far fewer young attendees to the most recent round of No Kings marches in proportion to the attendance of older generations. On our own campus, there has been a distinct lack of large-scale, effective protests since the spring 2024 Gaza Solidarity encampment, named “Camp Resilience,” and the infamous “Wanted” poster scandal. These called attention to and moved against URochester’s ties to Israel and the genocide in Palestine.
In the past two years, it felt like there was a protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza or the University’s ties to Israel at least once a month. Students occupied Wallis Hall, camped on Eastman Quad for a month, disrupted the University’s annual Boar’s Head dinner, and caught national media attention for putting up the “Wanted” posters. And students were concerned about more than just the war in Gaza, as graduate and undergraduate students alike participated in multiple actions last year to support the attempt to form a graduate student union, including chanting during graduation.
Even before the graduate student strike and the Israel-Palestine protests, this campus was a place for active student protesting. In the spring of 2023, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized an encampment to protest inequity in housing on Wilson Quad. SDS also organized “Stop the Build” protests against the construction of the Catholic Newman Center and the Greenbaum Center for Jewish Life, and in 2014, a peaceful protest in response to the grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Minnesota. Back in 2009, the organization occupied Goergen Hall in an earlier solidarity movement for Palestine. In fact, in an admissions blog from Natalie Ziegler ’18, one of her main reasons for choosing URochester was because “a spirit of activism permeates this campus.” Whether it was to make change or commemorate individuals, activism was a notable aspect of campus life.
But where is that spirit now? World politics are as turbulent as ever, yet we can’t think of a URochester student protest on that subject this academic year. Maybe we’ve missed instances, or student protesting is just less visible nowadays. But maybe our campus has become less politically active.
Though a graduate student union has not been formed, students have stopped demonstrating. The Newman Center opened without protest on Easter despite previous student opposition, and though there have been no significant changes to the housing process in the last three years, encampments are nowhere to be seen.
So why have students stopped protesting? Possibly because it doesn’t seem to work. Country-wide protests against the war in Gaza achieved what? How much awareness on campus did they bring about? How many conversations about divestment were held, just for University administrators to change nothing? From what we can tell of URochester at least, all student protests have achieved is a stricter policy against protests and demonstrations.
Students at URochester and throughout the US now stand to face much stricter consequences for protesting. The Demonstrations, Vigils, and Peaceful Protests Policy page was last updated on Aug. 26, 2024, on the heels of Camp Resilience. The page details that student protests are required to “obtain approval for undertaking protests, vigils, and/or demonstration events.” This has allowed the University to deny whichever protests they deem inappropriate and led to strict consequences for protest organizers. The University has charged students who violate these policies, and the requirement to obtain approval has led to many protests never occurring at all.
This pattern has repeated in universities across the nation. Columbia University in New York City has become a cautionary tale for college students and administrators alike. The university’s East Butler Lawn was the site of the first Gaza Solidarity Encampment, and the camp’s brief life was marked by persistent heightened NYPD presence and harassment. On the basis of their affiliations with these protests, five Columbia students were detained by ICE. The detainees were all international students who were here on student visas or who were green-card holders. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was quick to initiate deportation proceedings.
These increasingly harsh reactions from university and national leadership might be because they believe the wider public will tolerate them. A Gallup poll in 2023 found only 36% of respondents indicated significant trust in higher education, down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015. Furthermore, while the 2015 poll found trust in education uncontroversial, with a majority in every measured subgroup indicating trust across age, gender, educational attainment, and party identification divides (with the sole exception of political independents), the 2023 poll found trust had become highly polarized, with only 19% of Republicans indicating trust, and only Democrats out of every subgroup measured maintaining a majority for trust.
A protest’s ability to shape public opinion relies on the public’s trust. When a large portion of the American public has lost faith in the political neutrality of higher education and no longer associates universities with the truth, it only makes sense that the public would not as readily follow the lead of campus protests, and so those protests would be less effective. It seems likely, then, that URochester is experiencing a symptom of a wider political shift. Why would protesting work if there is no one to take up the call, and why would students keep protesting if it isn’t working? But if students, the next generation, are being taught that protesting is ineffective, in twenty years there will be no one left to protest.
