United States: Rising tide of student revolt

Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan has become familiar as the epicentre of the American protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street. But when demonstrators left the site in November, their destination was not the financial district, City Hall or the neighbourhoods where the citys wealthy 1 percent (the protesters call themselves the 99 percent) live in buildings guarded by doormen.The marchers headed instead to the City University of New Yorks Baruch College campus, pledging on the way to stop repaying their student loans, and trying to interrupt a hearing at which the universitys trustees were considering yet another tuition fee rise. Forcibly evicted from the public parks it had occupied for weeks in cities from Boston to Oakland, California, the boisterous Occupy movement shifted suddenly and dramatically on to university and college campuses. At the same time, it added to its many grievances the skyrocketing cost of higher education, complaining about everything from student-loan debt to lofty presidential salaries and benefits. This shift of focus, physical and ideological, has not been welcomed. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, long synonymous with the free-speech movement of the 1960s, were jabbed with batons by police in riot gear when they tried to set up an Occupy encampment. At the University of California, Davis, a campus police officer doused seated protesters with pepper spray in an incident caught on video that instantly went viral, inciting international outrage and calls for the chancellors resignation. At Harvard University, campus and specially hired security guards locked the gates of Harvard Yard to avoid people joining a demonstration there, shutting out even Harvard students. At Baruch, hundreds of protesters were forcibly pushed outside, and 15 arrested, after trying to get into the public hearing and refusing to leave. Even hard-pressed city mayors gave the protesters more latitude than the universities. And organisers, whose message has received a huge media boost as a result, could not be happier. We saw the violence that happened in Berkeley, and that coupled with the tearing-down (of protesters tents) in Zuccotti Park is what really energised the college movement, says Natalia Abrams, a co-founder in Los Angeles of a new national organisation called Occupy Colleges. The silver lining is that we must be hitting a nerve. The shift of attention to university and college campuses — more than 120 had Occupy chapters at the last count — is also simply because, once protesters were evicted from city parks and plazas, university spaces became a natural new place for them to, for lack of a better word, occupy, says Robert Self, an associate professor of history at Brown University who studies politics and social movements. Another factor is that many of the Occupy protesters, from the outset, have been students. But there is also a broader reason why universities are the new targets, according to Prof. Self. There are probably a handful of institutions in the United States where what I would call the neoliberal shift — as a larger term for…