Occupying Higher Education: The Revival of the Student Movement

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) began as an encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011. It has since evolved, with protests moving into new cities and in a number of different tactical directions.

College campuses around the country are one place where organizing has been injected with new energy. OWS invigorated a student fightback against the growing power of big business, both on and off the campuses—a power that comes with budget cuts, tuition increases, and attacks on working people. But new organizing since late 2011, by public and private university students alike, reintroduced some of the basic questions that all emergent movements face: “What do we want?” and “How do we get it?” There appears to be a growing consensus around the first question—students want to leverage their power to build a student movement in solidarity with the broader aims of OWS. Yet how to do that is still being worked out. To date, the Occupy movement on college campuses remains a relatively loose network that lacks a clear target for a national campaign.

Student activists are simultaneously pursuing strategic objectives in two arenas: off-campus student solidarity work with OWS encampments, local labor movements, and poor communities; and organizing on campuses to fight back against tuition hikes and the general privatization of colleges and universities. As the student movement evolves, it will be critical to build a national campaign by adopting tactics that link students with struggles, both on and off the campus, that focus on a coherent set of targets.

Organizing Outside the Campus Walls

University students make up a core element of OWS. In a survey of 301 Zuccotti Park protesters, 25 percent identified as such.¹ As one student activist reported in her blog, “The student aspect of OWS cannot be overlooked. For years, all I heard was that my generation was apathetic, that we were out of touch with reality, that there were no battles left for us to fight. The last two months have proved that wrong. Young people realize what is going on in the world. We know that we have been cheated out of the futures that we were promised.”²

But college students not only act in support of the folks stationed in urban encampments or even the movement’s broader goals. Like OWS itself, students are in the process of identifying a number of concrete areas to put their organizing energies into.

Solidarity with OWS

In the two U.S. cities with the most Occupy activity, Oakland and New York, students have been front and center. Hundreds of students from college campuses throughout the Bay Area participated directly in the so-called 2011 Oakland general strike, which consisted of a massive march to the Port of Oakland from Ogawa Plaza. While the city was far from completely shut down, many businesses were forced to close their doors. And, by many accounts, the events of the day were successful, with many local unions—including SEIU Local 1021, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, ILWU Local 10, and the Oakland Education Association—expressing support.

In New York, students organized a student walkout/march on October 5, 2011. The march temporarily shut down several avenues and streets, and later met up with a larger pro-OWS march consisting of community and labor groups. It was primarily the result of organizing by students at the City University of New York (CUNY) campuses, New York University (NYU), and the New School. That student convergence served to establish a relatively well-organized network of local OWS student activists. Using an all-city listserve as the primary mechanism for engaging in cross-campus organizing, the student network hosted all-city student assemblies that took place every Sunday for the next few months in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park. The assemblies created spaces for students to air grievances about issues such as educational debt and tuition hikes, debate strategy, engage with the public, and build support for student activism and OWS. And—just three days after the NYPD...