Student movements generally are thought of college student movements. These young adult movements have a long history in widely differing societies. Some have been characterized as direct student redress of situational grievances, such as the seventeenth-century sacking of the English Jesuit College of La Fleche to protest a rigid, strained regimen and the student protests led by African-American and Hispanic students on over a hundred campuses in the 1980s and 1990s to protest cutbacks in governmental aid and scholarships for lower-income students. Other student protest movements have been related to larger social movements. Examples are evident over time and space, including the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary student movement, the American civil rights and antiwar student movements of the 1930s and 1960s, the 1970s Greek student Polytechnic protest that precipitated the downfall of that country’s military dictatorship, and the ill-fated Chinese Tianenmen Square democratic movement in the late 1980s.
Student movements have the potential to generate major social change in the context of underlying economic, demographic, and other social forces. This makes student movement a strategic factor in assessing the nature of some consequential social change developments in society. The recent history of the United States exemplifies this idea. The far-reaching Civil Rights Act of 1964, the public shift from support of to opposition to the Vietnam War, and the pressure to diversify college student bodies and curricula racially and ethnically all involved student protest-induced changes that have affected the lives of people throughout American society and influenced student movements in other societies, as movements in other societies have influenced American students.
Other examples of consequential student protest movements extend back a millennium or more. What is different about contemporary student movements is the combination of their frequency and their consequences for social change in society. This is a reflection of the central role of formal education in economic and social stability and development in both advanced technological and developing societies.
The massive growth of higher education, with the concomitant potential for student movements, is evident from the change in the proportion of young adults in their late teens and early twenties attending college. Before World War II, even in the advanced industrial nations of Japan, the United States, and Canada, as well as in Great Britain and western Europe, less than 10 percent of the young adult age cohort attended college. The figure was less than 1 percent in emerging, often formerly colonial, developing nations. In contrast, by the late twentieth century, close to half of young adults were in college in advanced technological societies, and the fastest growing student body in developing countries had become collegiate. Overall, instead of a few hundred or a few thousand students, major state universities in the United States now generally have between 20,000 and 40,000 or more students, with long-established private universities typically having over 10,000. Similarly, large national universities such as those in Beijing, Tehran, Madrid, Mexico City, and Moscow have student bodies larger than those of the largest U.S. state universities.
The growth of public education generally, and collegiate education in particular, has placed young adult students in a strategic position in respect to the potential of protest movements to induce social change. Prototypical examples at the end of the twentieth century range from the student protests that keyed the unexpected election of the former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura to the governorship of Minnesota and the overthrow of the authoritarian Suharto regime after over thirty years in Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation in the world.
The precipitating causes of these student protest activities were very different. In the case of Minnesota, the economy was strong and played no discernible role. Key factors were the intense national political conflict between Republicans and Democrats over President Clinton’s sexual scandal, charges of obstruction of justice, and partisan controversy over a presidential impeachment. This induced many students and other young people to change allegiance from the established national parties to a reform party candidate. In Indonesia, the Asian economic crisis of 1998 played a key role in the protest activity of students demanding a more democratic government and more equitable economic opportunities.
In terms of real or potential effects on the direction of society, it is not only that college students represent a high proportion of influential future economic, political, and social leaders. The growth of colleges since the middle of the twentieth century is also an international reflection of the general public’s and democratic and authoritarian regimes’ recognition of the importance of the educational training of students. This training represents a key element in the future of various societies in the modern cybernetic economic era.
There has been extensive research on what motivates consequential proportions of students to engage in protest movements. There is irony in the fact that students represent a relatively privileged and prospectively influential group in society. These characteristics generally are associated with support for the established social order, yet students are often in the activist forefront of protest movements aimed at changing that order.
This seeming contradiction has been addressed in intergenerational conflict terms since the time of Socrates and Plato. In sociology, Mannheim (1952) addressed specific attention to this phenomenon as part of his concern with the sociology of knowledge. Building on Mannheim’s analyses, Feuer (1969) holds that the need for the emerging young to replace older adults in societies generates inherent intergenerational conflict that crystallizes in increasingly influential collegiate settings.
In this context, it is held that students act out their traditional intergenerational conflicts in a setting that is particularly conducive to challenging the older generation. Colleges, and to a lesser extent primary and secondary schools, remove students from familial and kinship settings. While faculty members present an adult schooling influence, in the increasingly large school settings, students are placed in a peer-related situation removed from both direct familial influences and the later pressures of occupational positions.
This relatively separated, peer-influenced life pattern is evident in the precipitating protest actions of many student movements. Most sociological research has dealt with student participation in major protest movements involving civil rights, environmental protection, war, and other momentous public issues. However, a review of the student movement literature demonstrates that often the early motivation for student protest against university administrators and more general societal authorities has been related to specific student-experienced grievances over American-based situa-tional concerns such as poor dormitory food in the 1950s and concerns among Italian and Chinese students in the 1960s and 1980s that growing numbers of college graduates were unemployed or were receiving lower pay than were undegreed manual laborers (Altbach and Peterson 1971; Lipset 1971).
Immediate student self-interest also can be seen in respect to student participation in larger social movements. This has been evident in respect to direct student concerns about conscription and being forced into combat situations. The 1860s Harvard University economic and social elite student anticonscription protests during the Civil War helped precipitate congressional modification of who was subject to the draft. Those with several hundred dollars were allowed to commute their draft status to the next young man called up who could not afford to commute being drafted. This was a central factor in the poor nonstudent Irish Catholic, conscription riots of 1863 in New York City that left several hundred dead.
Similar immediate self-interest was a part of the American Student Union antiwar movement before World War II in the 1930s as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. These student protests partially reflected general public disagreement about war support, but the most common precipitating thread was immediate student interest. A particularly clear case of student self-interest was the high involvement of African-
American students in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, working for more openings and support for African-Americans, who had long been excluded from equal higher educational opportunity.
However, immediate self-interest does not explain the active involvement of most participants in student movements to support disadvantaged minority and low-income groups. This is seen in protest actions such as extensive involvement in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and other American civil rights organizations in the 1960s and the 1989 student effort to establish democracy in China. In this respect, students tend to activate parental ideals and values that are perceived to be falling short in their implementation (Davies 1969). What has become evident in the extensive empirical research on student movement participants since the 1960s is that the conflict of generations thesis advanced by Mannheim, Feuer, and others is less a conflict of generations than an active attempt among the student generation to realize the values to which they have been socialized by the parental generation.
Rather than challenging the values of the parental generation, student activists generally support those values and work to see them actualized (DeMartini 1985). A case in point is the background characteristics of students who were active in the politically liberal SDS, which was strongly against the Vietnam War, and that of those in the politically conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), which was strongly supportive of that war. As Lipset (1971) reports, SDS students were mostly from high-status Protestant homes where secular, liberal values prevailed. In contrast, but in intergenerational concurrence, YAF student activists generally were drawn from strongly religiously observant and conservative homes in lower middle-class and working-class settings. Another example of this intergenerational confluence is Bell’s (1968) documentation that the largest proportion of white student activists in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were Jewish and were actively expressing their home-based familial values in support of minority rights.
Student movement concerns with actualizing ideals have been a dynamic aspect of those movements. The national student Free Speech Movement in 1964 was precipitated by University of California at Berkeley students who protested a specific ban on allowing a CORE civil-rights-information table on the campus in an open mall area. While a relatively small number of students were actively involved with the CORE table, a large majority of students, first at Berkeley and then nationally, supported the First Amendment right of open expression, leading to the larger Free Speech Movement (Altbach and Peterson 1971).
Protest movements generally are time-delimited. Given the relatively short age dimensions of student status, student movements tend to have even shorter time spans. Even with time and leadership delimitations, student movements are sufficiently common and consequential that more systematic research is needed on not only who the student protestors are but also where they go after a student activist movement ends. Research is beginning to ascertain the extent to which former student protest activists’ ideas and behaviors continue to reflect their protest values.
It is clear that most student activists enter into business and professional, high-socioeconomic-status positions. What is not as clear is the extent to which they continue to adhere to the values and related issues that motivated them to engage in student movements. Research in this area of student movements is suggestive of long-term consequences.
An analysis over time of 1960s student protest activists and nonactivists indicates that protest values continue to influence social, economic, and political behavior. Well over a decade after their civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activity, former activists continued to be more change-oriented than average, and given the nature of their protests, they were more liberal on issues of civil rights and civil liberties. Their orientation was to support more than did nonactivists government action to address a wide range of social problems and support specific policies such as abortion rights and affirmative action for minorities’ and women’s educational and employment opportunities (Sherkat and Blocker 1997). Further research may demonstrate additional social change consequences on society long after specific student movements have ended.
