Student Protests Research Articles

Burned Bridges: How Domestic Politics Impacts Black Students’ Campus Lives

Burned Bridges: How Domestic Politics Impacts Black Students’ Campus Lives Kali Morgan (bio), Tonisha B. Lane (bio), and Ebony N. Perez (bio) Recent policies, events, and movements have thrust race relations into the center of US domestic politics, as former President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his administration’s policies aggressively advanced white supremacist beliefs and attitudes (Miller, 2020). White supremacist propaganda, as well as racially motivated hate crimes, have increased on college campuses in recent years, particularly since the 2016 presidential election (ADL, 2019; Sutton, 2019). Across the country, news outlets have reported a steady rise of anti-Black racism at institutions marked by student protests, the hanging of a noose in the elevator of a residence hall, and even physical assaults against Black students. The perpetrators of such racial violence have received lenient consequences, including sentence reductions or “diversion” training (Hoskin, 2020). Students feel these realities: external and institutional contextual factors such as these impact students’ meaning making as they develop their political identities (Morgan, 2021) and their perception of race relations (Lott & Love, 2019). Black college students navigate this vicious landscape as they pursue their college education and develop political and civic engagement habits that educators intend to last beyond college graduation (Denson et al., 2017). Educators may encourage extra- and cocurricular experiences and cross-racial relationships, as both experiences further students’ post-college political and civic engagement (Denson et al., 2017). Yet, these developmental opportunities are also fraught with racial stress. Specifically, Ogunyemi et al. (2020) found that political activism actually heightened racial stress for African American collegians compared to other students of color, which may have been due to greater exposure to racial microaggressions. Moreover, many students arrive on college campuses from racially homogeneous environments and are ill-prepared to engage in cross-racial discussions (Patton, 2016), therefore, making it more difficult to develop the skills needed to create authentic relationships across racial lines (Park & Chang, 2015). Because these cross-racial relationships are critical to students’ post-college political and civic behaviors, for this research-in-brief, we explored the cross- racial contacts occurring organically in Black [End Page 707] college students’ relationships with white peers during the contentious 2016 election cycle. FRAMEWORK We employed the integrative model of racial-ethnic identity enactment (Cross et al., 2017) to answer our research questions: (a) How did Black college students at one historically white, metropolitan university make meaning of racially and politically driven assaults? (b) How did they negotiate intergroup contacts during the 2016 election and inauguration cycle? This framework recognized the agency of individuals to choose the identity enactment they selected in a given situation, differentiating enactments individuals use within their referent groups (intragroup) and those they use across and outside their referent groups (intergroup; Cross et al., 2017). We focused on two types of intergroup enactments: buffering and bridging. Buffering occurs when individuals perceive a threat in the interaction, such as racial discrimination, and seek to protect themselves physically or psychologically. Bridging is building constructive relationships across racial barriers, even though the target individual is associated with the racial group that has repeatedly demonstrated bias (Cross et al., 2017). METHODS We applied interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in this study. IPA enables researchers “to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world, and the main currency for an IPA study is the meanings particular experiences, events, states hold for participants” (Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 53). As such, researchers engage in a “two-stage interpretation process” wherein the participant makes sense of the world, while the researcher makes sense of the participants’ sense-making (Smith & Osborn, 2003, p. 53). Our study took place on a southeastern metropolitan campus during the 2018–2019 academic year. To facilitate data generation, we conducted seven 60- to 90-minute focus group interviews with two to five participants in each group. Participants included 28 self- identified Black students (22 women, 4 men, and 1 genderqueer student). Most were juniors and seniors (n = 21), and more than half were in a social science or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major (n = 16). Recruitment strategies entailed sending emails through listservs tied to the multicultural affairs office and...

Restorative learning for fostering a decolonised curriculum attuned to sustainable teacher education

Social sustainability is paramount for peaceful and inclusive societies. It embraces all cultures and civilizations while promoting that these contribute to, and are crucial enablers of, sustainable development. One aspect hereof is knowledge-what is taught and who decides. South African students remain frustrated with the Eurocentric and Western dominated university curriculum. This was made evident in the iconic 2015 student protest movement that, along with current and preceding protests laid bare the stark inequalities that persist in higher education and students outcries for socially relevant education that acknowledges the global South. In this article, we draw on data that emanated from qualitative interviews conducted with ten North-West University postgraduate teacher education students to unlock their concerns and aspirations for a decolonised curriculum in higher education. Students expressed their concerns with the political nature of the systems of power in higher education that are exclusionary, the need for the curriculum to be contextualized, and the tendency for decolonisation to be perceived as a threat. Students voiced their aspirations for a decolonised curriculum by specifying the importance of decolonisation as a process through teaching approaches like storytelling. We propose restorative learning as one avenue in response to students' outcries for the need to be critical of abyssal thinking and to challenge the root of hegemonic knowledge systems in such a way that decolonising the curriculum can be attuned to sustainability aspirations related to justice and social equity.

The December 12th Student Movement: Uyghur Student Protest in Reform-Era China

AbstractBy assembling more than fifty hours of interviews with eleven former Uyghur students and teachers, alongside an array of published and unpublished textual documents, this article offers the most complete history of the Uyghur student movements of the 1980s—in the face of considerable neglect and confusion. It argues, first, that the university functioned as a social, intellectual, and political space that allowed Uyghurs to develop their ethno-national identity, build shared grievances, and mobilize politically. Second, it argues that the December 1985 Uyghur student movement was a foundational turning point in the erosion of Hu Yaobang's accommodationist ethnicity policies of the early 1980s, changing how the Party-state diagnosed the reasons for Xinjiang's instability and delimited Uyghur political participation in the People's Republic of China. This article further unsettles later attempts by Chinese scholars to retroactively characterize the student movement as essentially separatist and the work of behind-the-scenes plotters.

Path to opposition: the motives of the student protest in Leningrad in the 1920-ies

Students have traditionally been a breeding ground for political protest. This tradition was formed back in the pre-revolutionary period, when students of universities and institutes were active participants in both the work of political parties of various persuasions and the all-university struggle for expanding the autonomy of higher education. In the first period after the revolution, the students continued to be one of the most active protest groups, which was most clearly manifested during the intra-party struggle of the 1920-ies. Continuing the theme of the student movement in the early USSR, which we touched upon in previous publications, in this article we turned to the problem of motivating opposition university students. To do this, we used materials from the Control Commissions of the CPSU (b) and personal party files, which make it possible to compensate for the small number of sources of personal origin related to the history of the Left Opposition. Despite the great growth of interest in the topic of the anti-Stalinist alternative in the CPSU(b), this valuable range of sources was not included in the existing studies. The article provides a grouping of the main motives and reasons for involvement in opposition work, as well as an assessment of how they coincided with the content of program documents prepared by the leaders of the movement. Among the main reasons that we have identified are: disagreements with the Central Committee on the peasant and Chinese issues, suppression of inner-party democracy, the search for thrills, the protection of the authority of the Bolshevik leaders (G.E. Zinoviev, L.D. Trotsky), etc. We will also describe the path of involvement of students in the opposition struggle, and the role of informal and family ties in this process will be determined as well

Policing Student Protests in Turkey: From the Promise of ‘Citizen in Uniform’ to Dictating ‘létat c’est moi’

To fulfill the requirements of European Union membership, Turkey promised to improve policing policies and practices in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was hoped that the police would embrace the concept of being “citizens in uniform,” serving the whole community and not merely the privileged few or state interests. However, in early 2021, during the student protest against the controversial appointment of a staunch supporter of the ruling party as the rector of Bogazici University, police adopted a heavy-handed approach responding to the protests, including a widespread abuse of power. Using the “cyber-ethnographic” method and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including the author’s 28 years of professional lived experience at the Turkish Police Academy, this essay claims that there has been a move to an authoritarian stage in the politics of the police. The study explores why students are labeled as deviants and terrorists and encounter other forms of discrimination and exclusion. The essay argues that the promise of the police as ‘citizens in uniform’ has been ignored and the police have been reverting to ‘létat c’est moi.’ The responses of the authorities to the student protests have been brutal: categorizing, marginalizing, blaming, criminalizing, and demonizing the students based on their ideological, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities. The article concludes that assaults on academic freedom, on the right of peaceful assembly and LGBTQ rights aim at homogenizing and controlling all areas of Turkey.

The histories we tell: historical consciousness and student protests in a Chilean public high school

ABSTRACT In the last fifteen years, high schoolers became key actors in the Chilean political landscape, as members of anti-neoliberal and feminist social movements. Although social researchers have paid increasing attention to them, few have analyzed how these young people relate to and make use of history in the context of their political struggles. Combining an ethnographic and a microhistorical approach, this article examines a Chilean public high school and a particular and widespread historical narrative about it. I argue that the different ways in which this narrative was invoked, transmitted and contested in a context of massive student protests – and the pedagogical devices and practices of cooperation and conflict used to do so – allowed the students of this school not only to use history in favor of their political agendas, but to participate in the continual production of a political field in which the borders of their historical community and who could be considered members of it were being disputed. In doing this, the article illuminates some of the complicated interactions between historical consciousness, political action and citizenship in modern societies, as well as illustrates the usefulness of combining an historical and an ethnographic lens to visualize the nuances and tensions existing when human beings make use of history. Further, it sheds light on the concept of historical consciousness itself, illustrating how historians and other social researchers can operationalize it to better comprehend how human beings relate with the past, but also the present and the future.

Fight or flight? Understanding female students’ response to sexist humour at an institution of higher learning in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Student protests of 2015–2016 in South African higher education institutions calling for the decolonisation of higher education spaces and equal access to these spaces have necessitated and led to increased scrutiny around the lived experiences, particularly of female students in university spaces. Critical attention has been paid to how hegemonic structures of power embedded in higher education spaces continue to exclude and marginalise female students through gendered, sexualised and other forms of social identity and difference which are often taken for granted. As such, the study explores how female students at a university in Zimbabwe process, react and respond to this collective expression of male hegemony through sexist humour. The study further explores how these enactments may be constrained and therefore serve to re/produce, legitimise and instil gendered norms of violence. Findings from this study reveal how women respond to, resist and affirm their position in higher education.

Policy Translation of Social Movements Demands: The Case of Free-Tuition in Higher Education in Chile

Chile experienced massive student protests against market-based education in 2011. In 2013, center-left President Michelle Bachelet proposed tuition-free higher education for Chile’s bottom 70%, fueling controversy due to the uncertainty and unexpected medium and long-term consequences. This study analyzes how the free-tuition policy was developed, the actors involved, the political discourse deployed during its implementation, and the strategy used to make this policy a reality. Using semi-structured interviews with key actors, such as policymakers and scholars, and a review of newspaper columns, we wanted to explore how politicians and bureaucrats translated the students’ demands into the free-tuition policy. Our findings suggest that the policy translation process involved former student leaders, free-tuition policy prioritization, and a quick, straightforward implementation process that enabled the government to fulfill its promise.

From Civil Rights To Black Power: The Hidden History Of Black Community College Activism In Chicago

During the rise of the Black Power movement, the Afro-American History Club fought for control of Chicago’s Woodrow Wilson Junior College, by challenging the viability of the college’s mostly Eurocentric curriculum for Black students. In doing so, they found themselves in public battles with Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley. As America’s most powerful mayor, Daley controlled the City Colleges of Chicago campuses with a system of political nepotism that fixed Black students at the lowest rung of the educational strata. This chapter critically examines the fight between the Afro-American History Club and “Pharoah” Daley in 1967-1968. Also, it investigates the impact of Daley politics on student activism and protest at Woodrow Wilson Junior College during the growth and development of the Black Power movement.

“Movements Come and Go and Are Soon Forgotten”: The Black Campus Movement at Fayetteville State, 1966-1972

Broad surveys of college student activism are impossible without the study of individual campuses. Studies of activism on historically Black college and university (HBCU) campuses in the United States tend to focus on larger more well-known campuses or those in large urban areas. Studies of student activism within North Carolina repeatedly highlight only three of the eleven extant institutions. This study contributes to the historiography of Black campus activism by using nine oral history interviews conducted with university alumni paired with extensive archival research to excavate the ways Fayetteville State University students contributed to the Black Campus Movement. This essay is a narrative of student protests between 1966 and 1972. Ultimately, such protests were grounded in major breakdowns in meaningful communication between faculty, administrators, alumni, and students and in HBCU students’ shared desire to have a say in decisions that affected their lives. Fayetteville State’s student body fully invoked James Baldwin’s notion of critiquing America in that they loved their institution more than any other institution in the world, and, exactly for that reason, they insisted on the right to criticize Fayetteville State and demanded that she rise to the occasion for which she was formed.

Partai Mahasiswa dan Politik Oligarki di Indonesia

This study focuses on the establishment of the Indonesian Student Party (PMI) on January 21, 2022. Most of the alleged political analysts believe that this is part of a movement that aims to break solidarity to fight for student protests demands nationally. However, this article wants to explore a much bigger motive than that. PMI is not an ordinary political party. PMI's collaboration design with the strong current of identity politics behind the metamorphosis of the 1945 Indonesian Christian Party (Parkindo) which greatly determined its existence, is of course very important not to be seen except as a democratic anomaly in the midst of the divisions that flared up, especially during the leadership of President Joko Widodo. Keywords : Student Party, Student Movement, Identity Politics, Oligarchy, World-System Perspective.

Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua by Claudia Rueda

Reviewed by: Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua by Claudia Rueda Anna Kathryn Kendrick Students of Revolution: Youth, Protest, and Coalition Building in Somoza-Era Nicaragua. By Claudia Rueda. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. xii + 291pp. Cloth $45.00. Building on the rich historiography on resistance to the Somoza dictatorship in twentieth-century Nicaragua, Students of Revolution is the first book to center the catalyzing role that university students played across four decades of protest and reform. Beyond the political history of mobilization, it excels in offering sensitive insight into the ways students acted as organizers and educators in their communities, though literacy, song, theater, and protest. In the process, Rueda convincingly demonstrates how networks of students and community leaders steadily built a cross-section of support over decades. This effort eventually led to the flight of Anastasio Somoza Debayle from Nicaragua in 1979 and, with symbolic and practical significance, empowered the revolutionary [End Page 454] Sandinistas to begin the task of governing through a mass literacy campaign led by a corps of 55,000 literacy workers—largely high school students and other young people. Authoritatively researched and clearly written, Rueda's study begins by setting forth a pivotal moment of dissent against the regime: the takeover of the National Cathedral in Managua by forty students at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) on September 26, 1970. Accompanied by priests and bolstered by a diverse array of allies, the student action led to the release of an imprisoned student, information on others' whereabouts, and an official human rights visit. Rueda contends that this incident was more than a manifestation of the global student protests of the "Long Sixties" that have dominated historiography in recent years. Rather, it represented the culmination of several decades of engaged student protests, coming in waves of organizing, building, training, repression, and response. These "students of revolution," Rueda argues, were driven by Catholic religious and democratic ideals rather than international networks of communism or Marxism. Though the book does expand extensively on the international anticolonial and anti-imperial networks forged by conferences, publications, and travels in the late 1950s and 1960s, the students had likewise been deeply engaged in organizing for democracy through their neighborhoods, parishes, schools, and families since the rise of the senior Somoza in the 1930s (Anastasio Somoza García, in power 1936–1956; his sons would alternately hold power until 1979). Drawing on an impressive array of oral histories, archives, and secondary literature, and structured across seven chronological chapters, Rueda shows how a Cold War–era, evolving resistance centered students as a privileged class with a wealth of weak ties that allowed them to influence and persuade individuals beyond their immediate circles. In a country in which school attendance was low, Rueda shows how secondary and university students held symbolic power that initially protected them from state violence as the future stewards of civil society. Who precisely these students were changed radically over time. During the early 1930s, at a time when the number of university students nationally totaled approximately two hundred (27), their elite status arguably allowed the development of a particular political consciousness of themselves as students with both privilege and responsibilities. As Rueda shows, early protests were largely self-protective, defending the status of professional titles and university autonomy. But the nature of student anti-regime protest changed as students increasingly initiated cross-class coalitions with workers and other democratic uprisings across Latin America, demanding the fundamental freedoms ostensibly promised by Nicaragua's close economic and political relationship with [End Page 455] the United States. Violence—tear gas, beatings, arrests—and the kidnapping of a law student in 1944 initiated a new phase of "democratic effervescence" (42) that ended with brutal repression in 1948, with the torture of dissidents and the murders of two high-profile student activists. Successive cycles of coalition building, protest, violence, quiescence, and rebuilding through to the book's temporal close in 1979 reinforced themselves across decades, lending symbolic power to opposition forces through the memory and practice of protest. Across these decades, Rueda is particularly effective in bringing forward the underrepresented contributions of women and families to anti-authoritarian...

The Social Movement Archive

The Social Movement Archive

Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan ed. by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Reviewed by: Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan ed. by Zaure Batayeva and Shelley Fairweather-Vega Alison Mandaville Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan Ed. Zaure Batayeva & Shelley Fairweather-Vega Trans. Zaure Batayeva & Shelley Fairweather-Vega. New York. Gaudy Boy. 2022. 296 pages. FROM A STONE house in a tiny village at the edge of the Caspian Sea to the close quarters of a two-room Soviet apartment in the urban landscape of Almaty, the works in this first collection of contemporary writing by fourteen women from Kazakh-stan in English translation explore the challenges of modern life—personal, cultural, and political—in fresh and surprising ways. Gender roles are complex. In “Aslan’s Bride,” by Nadezhda Chernova, a modern city woman, Milochka, unlucky in love, frustrated and lonely, abruptly leaves the city to travel to the rural seashore. There, she is adopted as a daughter-in-law by an elderly villager as the bride her son, lost in a war, never had. Milochka finds worth and belonging through this “ghost marriage” in a remote landscape where “the sea smelled fresh, and under the crescent moon the sand glowed a gentle blue.” In “A Woman Over Fifty,” Lilya Kalaus muses on age, gender, and obsolescence through an image of a typewriter, now only useful as a creative container for a cactus. She writes, “What can our current reality offer to a woman over fifty?” advising, “Pick up that typewriter. Put it on the desk. Slide back the carriage, cough a few times, crack your knuckles . . . And type whatever your little heart desires, directly on to that cactus.” Politics infuse many of these pieces, but you might almost miss it. In “Black Snow of December,” Asel Omar documents a silenced period of student protests, inter-ethnic violence, and violent repression in the 1980s. She writes though the eyes of characters who, like most, only “witnessed” this period while hiding indoors, as far from trouble as possible: through rumor and hearsay, glimpses out windows, from doorways on furtive shopping trips. These subtle narratives question the extent to which individuals can control their own fates. The young protester who insisted that “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees” becomes, years later, the corrupt police officer. The protagonist’s confusion at this transformation figures a society-wide confusion of roles and ethics: “He no longer knew who he was talking to.” Rooted in the landscape and cultures of Central Asia, these works are neither provincial nor exotic; they connect into the world and echo global history. The excerpt from “The Anthropologists,” by Zaure Batayeva, is a quasicomic piece on the collision between cultural stereotypes held by Western academics in Kazakhstan and the equally partial Kazakh ideas of “the West.” The odd popularity in post-Soviet regions of forgotten (but socialist!) writers like Theodore Dreiser, the belief that all Western academics are spies, and the bureaucratic hassles and paranoia of daily life in post-Soviet regions will all be recognizable to visitors. Conversely, westerners’ baffling ignorance of their own literature (Dreiser) and their marked oversensitivity to routine Kafkaesque scenarios will be familiar to residents of post-Soviet regions. And while this book went to press before Russia invaded Ukraine, it was jarring to realize that the fate of the ghost soldier in “Aslan’s Bride,” drafted under the USSR to fight a war in the West, may foreshadow the fates of so many men from poorer eastern regions of Central Asia today who are being recruited to wage war in Ukraine, far from their homes. These men leave holes in families and communities. Again. There are challenges in these works— but also a fierce sense of the power of simply existing. In “The Lighter,” by Olga Mark, a teen orphan girl swindles men and peddles sexual favors for cash to share with her orphan friends. This is a story of abjection—but also of a girl’s power in facing brutal conditions on her own terms—with an air of delight and unquenchable raw joy in the world around her. From the roof of a squatters’ building, “she looked for a long time at the city . . . then frozen, she...

How Metaphors Make Sense of Crisis: The Case of South African #FreeHigherEducation# Movement

Public universities in South Africa are embroiled in an era of unplanned radical change driven by violent student protests between 2015 and 2018 to ask for free higher education for poor students and overcome past inequalities amidst a broader, unstable economic climate. This paper uses a discourse dynamics approach to metaphor analysis to contextualize how higher education leaders experience and respond to a crisis. The power of metaphor analysis lies in the fact that it can help organize, interpret, and make sense of matters that are difficult to verbalize, particularly under constant pressures from many directions. Data were collected through 37 semi-structured interviews with senior managers from different portfolios within 16 public universities during a violent student protest and the instant implementation of free higher education policy in South Africa, which are combined and called #FreeHigherEducation# movement. The findings from this study advance the literature of leadership language in crisis by subtly understanding leaders' emotions via the way they use metaphors to convey what is truly felt and develop a framework of crisis adaptation. They also suggest recommendations for policymakers and higher education managers to steer change better.

Towards a New Conceptual Framework of Student Activism in South Africa

While the phenomenon of student activism is not new in South Africa, it has escalated recently and has taken on new forms. The literature expounds the emergence of a new modality of student activism in the form of protest movements employing social media as mobilisation tools. While such activism traditionally manifested itself in student representation in university governance structures and student demonstrations, protest movements and social media have emerged as its modern manifestation in South Africa. This article systematically analyses extant theories and conceptual frameworks to assess their relevance to these new modalities. After closely analysing key conceptual frameworks including Stakeholder Theory, the Ideal-type Regime of Governance Model and the Activist Leadership Model, it demonstrates their limitations for describing the emerging trends of student activism in South Africa, the paper proposes a new and robust conceptual model called Unbounded Student Activism.

Governors, Regents, and New Deal Liberalism: Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin, 1917–1945

Governors, Regents, and New Deal Liberalism: Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin, 1917–1945 John Moretta (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution University of Texas students gather before a protest against Texas governor James E. Ferguson, May 28, 1917. PICA 08003, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library. In 1960, southern historian Charles Ramsdell described a University of Texas colleague as “born and marinated in the deep South [Mississippi] and educated at the University of Virginia,” who declared that he found “absolutely no trace of Southern tradition either in the city of Austin or in his students from every part of the state. They are interested, he says, in no [Southern] traditions whatsoever, and Austin is a typical American college town, with a most un-Southern bustle about it; a general student and faculty environment and outlook not much different than that displayed on most of the Northern university campuses he had visited.”1 Inextricably linked and driving much of the city’s exceptionalism, especially when compared to other southern university towns, were the University of Texas’s students, who, beginning in the early twentieth century through World War II, became the vanguard for sociocultural and political [End Page 1] change in the state and institutional reform on their campus. Until the late 1950s and ’60s, student protests and demonstrations were a rarity on southern universities and colleges. However, that was not the case at the University of Texas (UT). Compared to other southern universities during the period, UT became a veritable “hotbed” of progressive student activism, countering the stereotypical image of southern White youth as a mass of conservative conformists at best and racist, red-baiting reactionaries at worst. Although such words may have described some Texans, UT students, especially by the late 1930s, were more inspired to action by the positive views of local, liberal religious leaders and faculty mentors who defied these regressive impulses. By comparison to 1960s direct action, pre-World War II student activism was more interpersonal and self-reflective, originating in existing student organizations, which increasingly reflected student interests in human rights and global peace. In many ways, prewar student advocates established the template for future student protest movements. This article explores some of the pivotal events and issues in the history of UT that ignited student activism in years 1917–45, emboldening collegians to publicly resist institutional policies and outside political interference they believed directly infringed upon their rights as students and the sanctity of the university environment. The university was to be a place where democratic values were inculcated and students’ civil liberties were respected by peers, faculty, and administration. Equally important to UT students by the 1930s was the recognition by regents and administrators that a democratically constituted student government and related student-sanctioned and -supported campus activities and institutions, such as the college newspaper, The Daily Texan, deserved the authority to act and advocate on students’ behalf. By the 1930s, existential crises, particularly the domestic socioeconomic upheaval caused by the Great Depression, further energized many UT students to engage in the reformist impulse unleashed by the New Deal. For many 1930s UT student activists, the Depression years not only revealed the inherent flaws of laissez faire capitalism, but perhaps more importantly, the social consequences of an unregulated economy. In the New Deal liberal ethos, students saw not only the means of immediate amelioration of human despair, but the long-range efficacy of positive government action in both mitigating and remedying future marginalization and disfranchisement, which if not addressed, could lead to class antagonisms and unrest as was the possibility in the 1930s. UT student activists also correlated the external crisis confronting the nation in the 1930s with their internal university battle against the regents’ suppression of academic freedom and student rights. As they saw it, the very same individuals responsible for the economic crisis were now in charge of their university, and as these wealthy plutocrats had abused the economy for their own material aggrandizement, they were inflicting [End Page 2] upon UT a self-serving agenda that was detrimental to the entire university community. American entry into World War II against the...

CHAPTER 5: Responding to the Call for Higher Education Transformation in South Africa: The Need to See Beyond “Decolonization” to Contextualization of the Current Curriculum

South African higher education has undergone numerous social, political and cultural changes that call for transformation in the sector. This dates to decades of diplomatic conversations and active protests on old and progressively new antagonisms. Attention-grabbing student protests – popularly referred to as the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall campaigns – set a new tone and platform for reflection by leaders in the education sector, inclusive of higher- and basic education in South Africa. These have steered many conferences, seminars and research on “transformation” by national education departments, universities, colleges and organizations such as Universities South Africa (USAf). The same protests brought to light several other challenges, such as funding, accommodation, security and academic exclusions, among others. However, as obnoxious as the situation may seem, it still provides the necessary conditions for a deep reappraisal of current hegemonies within the sector, which provides opportunities for stakeholders to reimagine how to shape the goal of the sector. This chapter provides a discussion on how such reimagination has concentrated on the decolonization of the curriculum as a shot at achieving the transformation agenda. For example, the series of debates on decolonizing the curriculum as fundamental to informing and achieving transformed higher education as organized by the Council of Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC). We argue that this approach is limiting in focus and scope and impacts less on transformational challenges in higher education. It is suggested that an all-inclusive curriculum suited for globalization is contextualized. Such an approach would not only address the need to decolonize the higher education curriculum and provide cognitive justice but also other higher education challenges such as graduate employment and curriculum relevance to national and international economic growth.

Navigating an anti-Black campus climate: #black@pwi

ABSTRACT In the 1960s, Black student protests of racism through sit-ins, building occupations, and demands for the resignation of university top administrators spurred the creation of ethnic studies and diversity programs on white university campuses in the United States. These efforts did not, unfortunately, dismantle entrenched structural racism. Black student activism continues to confront racial inequities using digitized campaigns on social media platforms to reach a global audience. This study uses critical race theory to explore how Black students at a white-dominant university give meaning to their racialized experiences as communicated using the twitter hashtag campaign #Blackatpwi. The results illuminate the magnitude of anti-Black racism and conditions under which Black students are expected to learn, the myriad ways white institutions reproduce and reinforce white supremacy and the students’ mobilization efforts to resist anti-Black racism. We provide recommendations to promote racial equity in higher education.

Introduction: Whose Present? Which History?

There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the present. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anxieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events. They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the world writ large, racial injustice, and the pandemic. The turn to the present, however, is at times marked by undeniable provincialism—one that consistently offers a narrow perspective for understanding new and emerging global realities. Some historians, for instance, have taken on the role of liberal watchmen ready to strike the tocsin against suspected fascism, but they regularly do so by focusing on Europe's fascist past of the 1930s to explain the contemporary order. Or consider the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. In the search for solutions, scholars proved quick to make historical comparisons to the great war economies of World Wars I and II, but appeared little bothered by the possibility that taking inspiration from Europe's age of extremes might “lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats.” So with the George Floyd protests: certain scholars and pundits likened them to the 1968 student protests in France and the United States, even as other scholars pointed out the historical shortcoming of the comparison.