When Formal Education Lags Behind Struggle: Student Activism, Global Justice, and the Praxis of Paradigm Shifts

• In Event: Collective Organizing and Scholarship for Social Justice

Abstract

The wave of pro-Palestinian student encampments across U.S. campuses has made visible a widening chasm between institutional rhetoric and institutional practice. While universities claim to champion diversity, equity, and inclusion, their responses to student organizing, ranging from arrests and suspensions to surveillance and censorship, expose the limits of those commitments. Rather than responding with engagement and dialogue, many institutions have met student dissent with tactics of repression, revealing the extent to which the academy is entangled with broader systems of settler colonialism, militarism, and political silencing.

This repression takes place alongside the deployment of diversity and inclusion discourse, which paradoxically becomes a means of disavowing responsibility. As Kil, Aghasaleh, and Harootunian (2025) show, queer visibility is often instrumentalized through pinkwashing tactics that present institutions as progressive while simultaneously punishing political speech that challenges the status quo. Inclusion becomes conditional, performative, and depoliticized—acceptable only when it does not question imperial power.
These dynamics reflect a broader pattern that Palestinian scholars have termed scholasticide: the targeted destruction of educational space and inquiry as a strategy of domination. While scholasticide originates in the context of military occupation, it resonates with how U.S. universities suppress political consciousness by severing thought from action and content from context. This severing is particularly stark when students raise questions about genocide, apartheid, or imperialism—questions that, while urgent, fall outside the permissible bounds of formal curriculum.
Against this backdrop, student activism constitutes an epistemic intervention. It challenges the university’s monopoly on knowledge and reclaims education as a site of ethical and political responsibility. Here, Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm shifts is instructive: student movements interrupt the prevailing “normal science” of institutional knowledge by introducing crises that the dominant paradigm cannot resolve without transformation. David Hume’s skepticism toward the supposed neutrality of empirical observation further illuminates how the academic pretense of objectivity often obscures its entanglement with ideology. What is deemed credible, legible, or appropriate within the academy is not an apolitical matter of evidence, but a political decision about what—and whom—the university is willing to recognize.
This struggle aligns with bell hooks’ vision of theory as a location of healing and possibility. From the margins, hooks insists that theory can emerge from lived experience and collective struggle—not just elite detachment. Student movements, in this sense, perform what hooks describes as “moving beyond pain” through radical acts of imagination, care, and refusal. They model education as mourning, solidarity, and resistance; as care work and coalition-building; as a horizon for collective becoming. In doing so, they destabilize what counts as knowledge and who counts as a knower.
It is this unsettling of epistemic authority that institutions seek to contain. As they silence, discipline, or co-opt dissent, the responsibility falls to educators and scholars to stand with students—not only in defense of academic freedom, but in pursuit of liberated futures. The most urgent academic work today is that which dares to break with complicity and affirms, with hooks, that theory and praxis are not opposites but companions in the long labor of justice.

Author

• Rouhollah Aghasaleh, California State Polytechnic University - Humboldt