Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements

In the 2023–24 academic year, protests swept across US university campuses, then campuses in Britain and elsewhere, demanding a ceasefire in the Israeli–Hamas conflict and specific university administrative responses to the conflict. This paper puts this recent wave of protests into historical persp...

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Main Authors: Kaur, H, Yuchtman, N
Format: Journal article
Language:English
Published: Palgrave Macmillan 2024
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author Kaur, H
Yuchtman, N
author_facet Kaur, H
Yuchtman, N
author_sort Kaur, H
collection OXFORD
description In the 2023–24 academic year, protests swept across US university campuses, then campuses in Britain and elsewhere, demanding a ceasefire in the Israeli–Hamas conflict and specific university administrative responses to the conflict. This paper puts this recent wave of protests into historical perspective. It first argues that the university must be understood not only as an economic institution that produces human capital, but also as a political institution that produces a society’s elites. As such, a fundamental institutional role is to endow entering cohorts of elites with an “ideological bundle”, which is also, at times, contested in the university environment. We present new patterns of such contestation, collecting information from multiple sources on protests involving university students across time and space. We argue that the current wave of ceasefire protests is best understood as a demand by young elites to modify the elite ideological bundle. Historical evidence suggests that such modifications have regularly been made following campus protests.
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spelling oxford-uuid:96d5e147-91f6-445a-8dc1-39ad63faf2b92024-12-17T20:06:14ZProtests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social MovementsJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:96d5e147-91f6-445a-8dc1-39ad63faf2b9EnglishJisc Publications RouterPalgrave Macmillan2024Kaur, HYuchtman, NIn the 2023–24 academic year, protests swept across US university campuses, then campuses in Britain and elsewhere, demanding a ceasefire in the Israeli–Hamas conflict and specific university administrative responses to the conflict. This paper puts this recent wave of protests into historical perspective. It first argues that the university must be understood not only as an economic institution that produces human capital, but also as a political institution that produces a society’s elites. As such, a fundamental institutional role is to endow entering cohorts of elites with an “ideological bundle”, which is also, at times, contested in the university environment. We present new patterns of such contestation, collecting information from multiple sources on protests involving university students across time and space. We argue that the current wave of ceasefire protests is best understood as a demand by young elites to modify the elite ideological bundle. Historical evidence suggests that such modifications have regularly been made following campus protests.
spellingShingle Kaur, H
Yuchtman, N
Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title_full Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title_fullStr Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title_full_unstemmed Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title_short Protests on Campus: The Political Economy of Universities and Social Movements
title_sort protests on campus the political economy of universities and social movements
work_keys_str_mv AT kaurh protestsoncampusthepoliticaleconomyofuniversitiesandsocialmovements
AT yuchtmann protestsoncampusthepoliticaleconomyofuniversitiesandsocialmovements