This course explores why student protest has surged repeatedly on 21st century campuses and how American universities became lightning rods for criticism from both the Left and the Right. Topics include student movements against racial and gender discrimination, nativism student debt, exploitation of labor, the concentration of wealth, Euro-centric curriculum, and the rise graduate student labor unionization. Student struggles over academic freedom, corporatization, and academia’s globalization, the commercialization of intercollegiate athletics, academic boycotts, divestment, and campus governance will also be assessed. These campus conflicts will be set into historical perspective, probing their roots in earlier struggles over the nature, mission, uses, and failures of the 21st century university, illuminating the changes, continuities, progress, and setbacks in American higher education and its student movements. Right wing student activists and their off campus allies will also be studied, as will the fate of free speech on campus in the politically polarized world of 21st Century America.
