Campus Protests and the Corporate University. My Conversation with Prof. DAVID SCHULTZ
The murder of the four students who protested the Vietnam War at Kent State University on May 1, 1970, was a tragedy. The suppression of student protests on campuses across the United States in the spring of 2024 is a farce. The latter points to how little college administrators and politicians have learned when it comes to students’ speech, thinking that repression is the solution for dissent and disagreement. The student protests of the 1960s were born of political anger. Students were unable to vote. They lacked a political voice in American elections and politics, and they lacked a voice in the governance of their schools. They demanded a seat at the table, the right to be heard and some control over the institutions that literally dictated their lives. Their demands for a voice were met with force and repression much in the same way that the civil rights demonstrators who crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge were.
