Three thousand miles due east, on a tiny patch of Lower Manhattan, people were camping out to protest Wall Street, decrying its stranglehold on politics and continuing enrichment as the economy flatlined. It was the first that Ms. Ward, then a senior, had heard of Occupy Wall Street, and as she learned more about it, her heart glowed. “I’ve been waiting for something to happen for years,” she said. “I was personally starting to get afraid that something like this wouldn’t happen in my lifetime.”
She and a friend resolved to bring Occupy to their campus. They printed fliers, set up a Web site and blasted out e-mails. They told as many people as they could about their action plan. On Oct. 1, they held a sprawling, consensus-style meeting on campus, a version of the general assemblies being held in Zuccotti Park in New York, and set up tents. And thus was born one of the first Occupy Wall Street college protests.
Occupy protests rapidly sprouted at other campuses: hundreds nationwide currently have or had some sort of Occupy-related activity going on. Mirroring the broader movement, students have taken aim at widening income disparities and the cozy symbiosis between Washington and Wall Street. But the college occupiers have also embraced a panoply of causes, localizing and personalizing their protests in a way that has lent an immediacy and urgency to their outcries.
At Tufts, students have used the attention garnered by Occupy to advance a decades-long push for an Africana studies department. At Occupy Pocatello, Idaho State University students are condemning Idaho’s high foreclosure rate from a handful of pup tents as well as more wind-resistant cardboard boxes. At Yale, a traditional feeder school for investment banks and hedge funds, students noisily protested a Morgan Stanley information session in the fall. Recruiting visits to Harvard, Princeton and Cornell have been similarly disrupted.
“I’m not sure it would’ve happened if Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t have started,” said Marina Keegan, of the Morgan Stanley protest at Yale, where she is a senior. “Definitely people are starting to think more critically about their choices after graduation and how they affect not just themselves, but the world.”
All of which sets Occupy-related student protests apart from much of the campus activism that has come before. A good chunk of student protest has focused on single issues: nukes in the ’70s, apartheid and Contras in the ’80s, sweatshops in the ’90s.
Many of today’s new graduates find themselves heavily indebted, and to the same institutions that received multibillion-dollar bailouts in the financial crash. Median income is stagnant. Their public universities are underfinanced, and class sizes growing. College activists have linked these issues to broad critiques of the financial-political complex.
“What you have with the Occupy movement is a criticism of global capitalism and the American financial system, but also a critique of policing on campus, tuition policy, the way universities are run,” said Angus Johnston, a historian who teaches at the City University of New York. “That is certainly resonant with the movements of the ’60s, because student activism of the 1960s connected up major national and global issues and campus policy.”
While students as recently as 2009 were taking over campus buildings — across California and in New York, at the New School — Occupy has drawn a wider swath. Previously apolitical students have been drawn by personal woes — their parents’ vanishing 401(k)’s, their fears of the job market. “This has been a catalyst for getting more students involved,” said Anne Wolfe, 20, a junior at Tufts who is working with protesters at Boston University and camped out at Occupy Boston.
“We’re able to get out of our own college bubble,” she said.
At Humboldt, students set their tents back up after winter break. The campus has embraced the protests: the Associated Students, a council representing students, gave their full endorsement of the occupiers. Ms. Ward said communitywide Occupy meetings were being held indoors, and expects the core people to remain involved for the long haul. But she also expects attendance to wane. “We have a generation that believes instant gratification is the only form of gratification,” Ms. Ward said. “This is something that’s going to take a long time.”
As with Occupy Wall Street itself, it remains to be seen whether protests will last. Some stalwarts kept an occupation going during winter break — at Illinois State University, Normal, seven large tents. But most college camps — potent icons of the protest — were dismantled near semester’s end. One venture, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, is foundering: signees vowed not to repay loans after one million people had signed, but two months in, just 3,000 debtors had taken the pledge.
“I’m hopeful but I have no illusions,” said Stephen A. Marglin, an economics professor at Harvard who spoke at an Occupy Harvard teach-in last month. “It’s not like I haven’t seen these things blaze out before.”
At Harvard, resentment had been building against the campus occupiers, who had erected about 30 tents in the fall. Citing safety concerns, the administration had taken the rare step of blocking access to Harvard Yard to anyone without Harvard identification, and the inconvenience of the checkpoint and restrictions on guests had curdled feelings. In mid-December, Occupy Harvard removed its tents to move into “a new phase of activism.” As classes resume on Jan. 23, students are planning teach-ins and outreach to keep alive what they now call “Occupy Harvard 2.0.”
“With OH 2.0, we can focus on specific actions and protests instead of using energy toward sustaining an unpopular occupation,” said Gabriel Bayard, a freshman who helped spearhead a walkout in November on an economics class taught by Greg Mankiw, who had been an economic adviser to George W. Bush.
Campus protests benefit from their setting — students can zip into their dorms for food, showers and restrooms. But some administrators have had to grapple with the safety and cleanliness issue while allowing for the cherished academic tenet of freedom of expression.
Seattle Central Community Colleges found itself hosting not just protesting students but also Occupy Seattle campers who had been rousted from a downtown park. The protesters soon settled on a campus plaza in some 70 tents. At first, administrators adopted a wait-and-see attitude. “Economic equity is sort of our mission,” said Jill Wakefield, the chancellor. “I’ve been at community colleges for 35 years. Nowhere did it prepare me to deal with 100 campers at one of our colleges.”
The problems that had riddled urban encampments found their way to the college site. Garbage accumulated. Discarded syringes were spotted and marijuana smoke wafted, causing a day care center that abutted the plaza to stop allowing children to play outside. There were reports of a possible sexual assault. Administrators wrestled with how to proceed. “You pray for snow, you pray for rain, but these are hardy campers,” Dr. Wakefield said. Last month, four weeks after Seattle Central’s board banned camping on campus, protesters moved peacefully off the site. In a blog post, Dr. Wakefield wrote proudly that the encampment “was one of the very few protest camps in the world to resolve peacefully.”
For their part, faculty members have largely supported the movement, participating in teach-ins and staging walkouts. After campus police at the University of California, Davis, doused students at a sit-in with pepper spray, it was the faculty association that called on the chancellor to resign.
Lisa Duggan, a professor in social and cultural analysis at New York University, is teaching a graduate course this semester that puts Occupy Wall Street in the broader context of other uprisings, including the Wobblies and the Arab Spring. She plans to host Occupy Wall Street activists as speakers and explore the history of debt and the rise of Wall Street. “I do think it has staying power,” Ms. Duggan said. “The issues themselves were so deeply felt across universities, across various communities in the U.S., and across the world.”
The movement has had the subtler effect of turning on its head the widespread characterization of today’s young people as entitled and apathetic. Among them was Ericka Hoffman, 26, a junior at California State University, Bakersfield, and one of the organizers of Occupy Colleges, a nonprofit group that facilitates Occupy movements at colleges. Before Occupy, activism did not interest her, but that changed with President Obama’s election. Ms. Hoffman saw him enacting policies as usual and, in her view, coming down on the side of Wall Street.
“This person touched the hearts of people who needed change and hope,” she said. “I think he let everybody down.” Meanwhile, her financial situation was worsening. She has $20,000 in student loans but has been unable to find even a menial job. “I can’t get a job at Target,” she said. “Even smaller jobs at Circle K won’t hire because they say you’re overqualified.”
Occupy protests at colleges provided a giddying sense of possibility. Bakersfield is a conservative town yet hundreds of students got involved. One professor brought her class out to talk to students doing a sit-in, and nearly half of them stayed.
“There are quite a few people who are apathetic,” Ms. Hoffman said. “Some of them don’t know what to do. They can’t see that it’s possible.”
But the hardest battle, she believes, will be getting the political and financial masters of the universe to listen.
“People in positions of power, I think they believe nothing is going to happen,” she said. “We’re just going to yell and scream and hold up signs and nothing’s going to change. But you’ve got an entire generation of people that realize something is wrong and something has to change because the system is wrong. There’s more of us than there are of them.”
Author: Cara Buckley, a metropolitan reporter for The Times.
Full url: Originally posted at The New York Times
