Student Unionism and Sustaining Student Power

Abstract

country’s most powerful political forces over the last seventy years. Although now forgotten by most historians, the first mass student strikes for free speech were launched in the 1930s. New Left activists revived the free speech movement in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, students had helped advance desegregation, forced LBJ out of a reelection bid, and regained the power to shut down America’s universities with sit-ins and strikes. Today, American students are beginning to wield their power again, shutting down the 1999 WTO meeting, forcing private prison companies off campus, winning campus living wage policies, and making their schools “sweat-free.” However, as in the sixties, the student movement is having to rebuild itself from scratch. Each time the movement realizes its power, it fails to sustain it. Consequently, corporate America and other outside forces have diluted curriculum, pushed tuition hikes, and kept American higher education largely inaccessible to poor people and people of color. In recent years, we have even seen conservatives begin to roll back what token affirmative action programs exist in higher education. These problems have advanced in large part because students and faculty have been disempowered in university decision making. The student movement need not continue this way. The American student movement can sustain itself this time around with a new brand of student unionism that borrows the best aspects of the labor movement, past American student movements, and foreign student movements. Such unionism could open U.S. universities to the disenfranchised and make student power and campus democracy realities.