{"id":18339,"date":"2017-04-13T11:23:33","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T15:23:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18339"},"modified":"2017-04-13T11:29:14","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T15:29:14","slug":"why-do-students-sometimes-lead-social-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=18339","title":{"rendered":"why do students sometimes lead social change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Cincinnati) At several critical points during\u00a0the past century, college students have been at the vanguard of social change. Their agendas have\u00a0not always been desirable; fascism, for example, had a student wing<\/a>. But student activism\u00a0is an important phenomenon. I think four\u00a0frames of reference are most common for explaining it:<\/p>\n

Age effects: Traditionally, most\u00a0college students have been\u00a0young. During young adulthood, individuals become aware of the\u00a0social world but are still forming their identities and opinions. That gives them a certain critical detachment that is favorable to radical activism. They are also not overly burdened by experiences of political failure. Using that framework, we would expect younger adults\u00a0consistently to be more active.<\/p>\n

Generational effects: People who come of age during the same\u00a0historical moment may form a shared and lasting identity as members of a given generation. The classic example (analyzed by Karl Mannheim in his seminal article<\/a>) is the experience of being drafted into WWI. With this framework in mind, we might presume, for example, that German college students became highly active after 1965 because they shared the experience of growing up in prosperous homes with\u00a0suppressed memories of the Nazi past. People born around the same time in contexts\u00a0as different as Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union might even share a common\u00a0generational identity (e.g., as children of The Sixties) if\u00a0some of their formative experiences were similar.<\/p>\n

Historical effects:\u00a0Major events can affect people differently\u00a0depending on their social circumstances. For instance, when a war breaks out, only the\u00a0young single men may be\u00a0drafted. A budget crisis can cause the government to cut funds for higher education; then college students see their fees go up. With this framework in mind, we would expect college students to become activated soon after\u00a0major\u00a0events affect them specifically.<\/p>\n

Class effects: College students come disproportionately<\/a> from middle-class or wealthy homes. Thanks to college, they are destined for positions in the top half of the income distribution. We might then interpret college student activism as “bourgeois” activism and ask why the bourgeoisie is, or is not, activated at a given moment.<\/p>\n

I would like to add a fifth\u00a0type of explanation, derived from some thoughts in Offe (1985). College students may face specific material circumstances that encourage–or discourage–them from being politically active. These circumstances\u00a0are variables that will\u00a0influence students’\u00a0levels and forms of engagement even of we hold age, generation, class, and historical moment constant. In other words, these are consequences\u00a0of how college is organized socially.<\/p>\n

Offe argued that certain demographic groups predominated in the\u00a0New Social Movements of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Second Wave feminism and environmentalism. Two especially active groups were “housewives” (his word) and college students. He proposed that both groups were exposed to explicit discipline that provoked\u00a0them to criticize social norms. Married women\u00a0faced explicit coercion from their husbands; students, from their universities and parents. Yet both enjoyed a degree of flexibility about how to\u00a0employ their time. That meant that they were able to protest if they wanted to.<\/p>\n

I think we can\u00a0elaborate on these explanations. Typically, college students who attend large institutions along with many other full-time students experience\u00a0the following material circumstances:<\/p>\n