24 centuries ago Plato was already complaining about young people who “ignore the laws and rebel in the streets, inflamed with wild ideas.” And since the university is by definition a place full of young people and ideas, some of them wild, campuses have always been the center of revolts and revolutions. Since long before this latest wave of protests against Israeli policies at different universities in the United States.
Some student revolts have had causes as lofty as world peace and goals as mundane as a decent breakfast. The first major university protest in the US occurred before the country was even founded, in 1766. The Harvard “Butter Rebellion” ended with half of the student body sanctioned for rising up against rancid butter. However, until after the Second World War, the university was the luxury of a few and the influence of their revolts was very limited.
Everything began to change in the mid-1940s, with the return of millions of soldiers for whom the government had promised to pay for their studies: their return doubled the number of university students to two million. But the great leap was made by the generation of his children. By the mid-1960s, there were already six million on campus, and by the early 1970s, at the height of protests against the Vietnam War, there were almost ten million. An explosion that put university students at the center of the most famous era of activism.
The generation that arrives on campus in the sixties is special. The baby boomers are children of World War II soldiers: they had grown up in a victorious, wealthy country, full of patriotic pride, but also somewhat paranoid about the Cold War and where activism was viewed with suspicion.
They were going to take the opposite path: if students at Dartmouth College had assaulted their chancellor’s residence in 1952 because he had limited alcohol consumption on campus, just a few years later student concerns were much more momentous.
Since the early 1960s, university students have been the protagonists of some of the most notorious protests against racial segregation, such as the “freedom rides” in which whites and blacks crossed the southern United States together by bus. Also the sit-ins in restaurants in the South that refused to serve them in the same space.
From these actions emerged some of the organizations that would channel student discontent during the following years, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
The manifesto of this last group in 1962, for example, already included demands against militarism when there were only a few thousand American soldiers in Vietnam, but it also mentioned racial inequality, the need for democratic representation or the failures of the economic model. Although there had been small university protests in the fifties, those of the sixties were to take on a completely new scale.
Many of the universities that appear in the news today as hotbeds of protests against Israeli action in Gaza are the same ones from that time: exactly sixty years ago, in May 1964, some 400 students from Columbia and other New York universities demonstrated against the city center calling for withdrawal from Vietnam and the suspension of military aid to the South Vietnamese regime, although the American presence was then 20 times smaller than it would become.
For many college students in the mid-1960s, trying to stop the war in Vietnam was a personal matter of the utmost importance. At the beginning of the conflict, university students could often get an extension and avoid going to the front, at least while they completed their studies, but as the war progressed and more and more troops were needed, all young men were at risk. His number in the draft lottery could come up at any time.
These students and their classmates, with the support of many professors, did not limit themselves to protesting against the war in an abstract way: they boycotted the recruiting services installed on campuses, they pressured their universities not to collaborate with the armed forces or industry. of defense and at the same time maintained other mobilizations in favor of civil rights, feminism, freedom of expression or labor rights.
The most tragic phase of the protests came in 1970. The maximum number of American troops in Vietnam had been reached two years earlier, with more than half a million soldiers, and President Richard Nixon had won the elections that year with the promise of a withdrawal. honorable However, when in 1970 he announced that he had ordered American soldiers into Cambodia, millions of students felt that the conflict would never end and that their chances of ending up in Vietnam skyrocketed.
In this context, a large anti-war protest was called at Kent State University in Ohio in early May. After several confrontations between the police and students, the state governor ordered the National Guard to take over the campus, and he himself traveled to Kent to warn that he would use “the full force of the law” against the protesters. whom he described as “the worst type of people America houses.”
On May 4, 1970, at noon, the National Guard began firing tear gas at some 3,000 unarmed protesters. When the soldiers failed to disperse them in this way, they began shooting with live fire into the crowd, killing four students and wounding nine others in what has gone down in history as “the Kent State massacre.” In the following days, 1,300 universities showed solidarity with protests and strikes. After a few weeks, Nixon called off the invasion of Cambodia.
In addition to trying to change the world, the protests of the 1960s changed many things at the universities themselves. Students at Berkeley, California, managed to overturn the rules that prevented them from protesting on campus. At others, such as San Francisco State University, student strikes forced the suspension of classes for months until those in charge agreed to hire more black and Hispanic professors and admit more students who did not come from wealthy families.
Many of those protests of the time were not entirely peaceful. The students burned the military offices of several universities and destroyed recruitment centers, even attacking the military who were trying to recruit volunteer soldiers among the students. When protesters occupied buildings on their campuses as a protest or as a means of pressure, they sometimes did so armed to ensure that they would not be easily evicted.
That legacy of student activism in the US, which relaxed after the exit from Vietnam, was reborn in the 1980s with anti-apartheid protests in South Africa to force universities to sever relations with any company that continued to do business with them. the regime. It is the path that some now want to explore against Israel, although this country’s ties with the US are infinitely deeper.
From then until today, campus protests have been at the center of anti-racist mobilizations such as Black Lives Matter or those calling for gun control, such as the March For Our Lives. lives”). Almost three centuries after the Harvard “butter rebellion,” university students continue to demand improvements in their living conditions, but also in the lives of everyone else.