10 Biggest Protests in College History
Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at
9:47 pm
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College campuses are often synonymous with student protest. That groups of students will band together for a cause is nothing new — students at Harvard rallied for better food in 1766 — but the 20th century seemed to bring a new level of college-level protest, especially during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s. Several entries on this list are from that era, but all are indicative of the way students use their time in college to question their beliefs and speak out against their elders. It’s a generational rite of passage.
- Athens Polytechnic: Greek was under military rule from 1967 to 1974; the junta is often referred to as “The Regime of the Colonels.” The era was a dark one for those who disagreed with the politics of the leaders, including university students, whose rights were often stripped. In November 1973, students at Athens Polytechnic went on strike to protest the junta, locking themselves in a building and broadcasting via pirate radio a message of struggle against the dictatorship. The protest drew crowds in the thousands, with workers joining the students in the fight for equality. The government rolled in with a tank to squash the action, and though no students were killed during the crisis, two dozen civilians were killed outside the campus.
- People’s Park: The University of California, Berkeley, has been a lightning rod for uprisings and protest for decades. The nearby People’s Park became the center of controversy in the 1960s, when locals co-opted university land for a park, an action that led to a major clash. University officials decided to let citizens use a section of the park, but before talks could go further, in May 1969, Governor Reagan sent in 300 officers from Berkeley PD and the California Highway Patrol to clear out the park and set up a perimeter. Thousands of protestors, already gathered for another meeting, rolled into the park and fought with law enforcement in an effort to take back the park. Many people were injured by tear gas and birdshot, and one student died, though his memorial service turned into another brawl when the National Guard was sent in. The park eventually returned to the control of the people.
- Kent State: About a year after the People’s Park protest, a protest at Ohio’s Kent State University became one of the most famous of the century. In May 1970, students on campus were protesting President Nixon’s announcement that U.S. forces would begin invading Cambodia. Several hundred students participated in multiple rallies and protests over the course of several days that led to arson and other trouble. They also had regular encounters with the National Guard, who used tear gas and other tactics to break up the crowds. More than 2,000 people gathered for a protest on May 4, and Guardsmen attempted to disperse the crowd. Many refused, and after some pursuit and retreat, the Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine. Two of the dead were protestors, but two were merely passing from one class to another. The Kent State shootings elevated the protest and the youth generation’s concerns about Vietnam to a new level.
- Student Strike of 1970: On the heels of the Kent State protests and shootings came one of the biggest college protests in history, so big that it wasn’t limited to one campus but instead took place nationwide. May 8, 1970, saw 100,000 protestors show up in Washington and another 150,000 in San Francisco. What’s more, student action erupted at campuses across the country, often in violent and terrible ways, including the attack and burning of ROTC buildings. Students fought with police at more than two dozen schools, and Nixon mobilized the National Guard on 21 campuses in 16 separate states to quell the protestors. Despite the violence in some places, many of the protests strove for peaceful demonstration. The widespread protests led Nixon to form the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest to study the causes and effects of such mass protesting.
- The Knickerbocker Case: The events of the Knickerbocker affair unfolded between 1945 and 1950 at City College of New York, with massive student protests in 1948-49. In 1945, several professors wrote a letter to the college president accusing William Knickerbocker, chair of the department of Romance Languages, of anti-Semitism. The state board of education found the charges baseless, but a city council special committee found them to be true. In October 1948, 2,000 students organized a sit-in to protest Knickerbocker’s employment and ask for his firing. The next spring, in April 1949, the student council voted to approve a student strike until Knickerbocker was given the boot, an event that led to a student brawl with police. In 1950, Knickerbocker stepped down from his place as chair, though he didn’t leave the school. Still, it was a major protest that showed just how powerful students can be when it comes to civil rights demonstrations.
- The Columbia Protests of 1968: There were many protests in 1968, not least of which were those that took place at Columbia University. In April, students protested to show their displeasure with the school’s affiliation with the think-tank Institute for Defense Analyses and some perceived race-based slights in the construction of nearby Morningside Park. One aspect of the protest was a militant takeover of Hamilton Hall, led by the 60 black students involved with the protest through the Student Afro Society. The black protestors told the white ones to start their own protest, leading to fighting within the camps. The protest and hostile takeover lasted through the month and was eventually ended when the NYPD came in and cleared out the buildings. More than 700 protestors were arrested and 150 were injured or hospitalized.
- California Tuition Protests: The University of California Board of Regents approved a 32% hike in tuition in 2009, a decision that understandably was not well received by the students across the state. As a result, students at multiple campuses in the U. of C. system rallied to protest that fall, including sit-ins and general strikes. At Berkeley, 41 students were arrested for trespassing after locking themselves inside a building to protest. More than 100 students protested at the Santa Cruz campus and lasted for three days before police cleared them out. Students were arrested at Davis as well. All told, more than 200 students were taken into policy custody statewide as part of the protests.
- Deaf President Now: Gallaudet University, the Washington university for deaf students, had been lead by a hearing president since its inception in 1864. In 1988, the Board of Trustees announced that the new seventh president would also be hearing, an act that sparked powerful protest from students who wanted a deaf president to better represent their needs. The Deaf President Now protest started with rallies in March 1988 that quickly led to a student-organized campus shutdown. The deaf students demanded four concessions before ending the protest: that I. King Jordan, a deaf man, be instated as president; that a board member who’d spoken derisively about deaf people be fired; that the board be reorganized to be at least 51% comprised of deaf people; and that no student protestors be punished for their actions. They barricaded school gates, burned effigies, and generally ran things for a week. All four of their demands were eventually met.
- German Student Movement: The global events of the 1960s, including Vietnam, were also felt in Germany, where college students were growing increasingly agitated by perceieved injustices in the government as well as a desire to fight a growing extremist press and to finally deal with the effects of their nation’s Nazi past only two decades behind them. Student protests occured on university campuses throughout Germany with increasing frequency, even as the government attempted to crush the uprising by reducing funding for the schools. A student was shot in the head during a protest in front of the Opera House in 1967, and that fall saw even more demonstrations on campus. In May 1968, students gathered together with union workers and marched a crowd of 80,000 in Bonn, West Germany, to protest the passage of certain legislation, but their efforts failed. On the upside, the protests did help female students gain a measure of equality.
- Wild Lily Movement: In 1990, students from National Taiwan University spearheaded a demonstration for democratic reform that swept the country. They engineered a sit-in at Memorial Square (not on a campus, but they were students, so it merits placement on the list) to protest for a direct presidential election, and the movement soon rounded up more more than 300,000 participants. The demonstration happened at the same time as the election of Lee Teng-Hui to a six-year presidential term, though he was the only candidate who ran. The Wild Lily Movement, driven by students, is what helped turn Taiwan toward democracy, and six years later, Lee won re-election in a popular vote in which all were allowed to participate. It’s an example of how a passionate protest can change the course of a country, or the world.
