The Institutional and Organizational Roots of Campus Protest in the United States

• In Event: The Political Context of Education

Abstract

In recent years, U.S. higher education has witnessed a remarkable increase in campus protest, both in sheer number and in the media and political discourse that follows. Given that a sizable number of politically active Americans spend their most formative years there, the university serves as an important site to theorize and grasp the formation and diffusion of youth-centered social movements. Drawing on an original dataset linking institutional, organizational, and political data across 1,740 U.S. colleges and universities, we model protest counts from 2021 through 2024 with negative binomial regression analyses. Effects of students’ racial and economic diversity on protest are almost entirely absorbed. Instead, the strongest predictors of protest are its organizational and institutional facilitators, which include established legacies of activism, the presence of DEI centers, and the presence of a vibrant student life. We also note the protest-suppressing effect of conservative local politics. These findings advance two explanatory theories about activism in higher education, the educational opportunity framework and the resource mobilization theory, which respectively argue that the institutional characteristics of and preexisting resource networks within the university shape the potential frequency of campus activism.

Authors

• Khoi Ngo, Washington University in St. Louis

• Kenneth Andy Andrews, Washington University in St. Louis

• Jonathan Coley, Oklahoma State University

• Jericho R McElroy, Oklahoma State University

• Jessica Schachle-Gordon, Stephen F. Austin State University