Student Mobilizations and Higher Education

In this chapter, the authors examine student mobilizations within the contested nature of formal education in the settler colony of the United States. As long as formal education has been in place in the United States, so has resistance to and subversion of formal schooling’s examples. The authors focus on certain examples because of their distinct demands related to power and policies that govern higher education, including two from regions beyond U.S. borders. In a historical, critical, and decolonial analysis, the authors prioritize context and power building in students’ mobilizations, attending to three primary questions: What is the nature of students’ demands? How does the university, as an arm of the state, respond to students’ demands? What insights can be ascertained from the dialectical nature of student protests and structures of higher education? These questions center the specific sociopolitical geographies of student mobilizations and their resistance to stratification of life that is foundational to the United States.  

Keywords: student mobilizations; higher education; protests; higher education administration; Morrill Acts; HBCUs; social movements; resistance