The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today
... However, it was surprising that conservative students were also supportive of speech restrictions and that only libertarians were overwhelmingly unsupportive of speech restrictions. Although this effect may have been due to the small number of conservative (n=3) and libertarian students (n=6), Binder and Kidder (2022) also found libertarianism to be an important ideology in shaping attitudes towards free speech. Interestingly, in their study, libertarian students often identified as conservative, while in my study, the libertarians identified as either exclusively libertarian or libertarian-left. ...
... These prototypes are likely driven by polarizing media narratives on both the political right and left, which have turned free speech into a political talking point (Binder and Kidder 2022). In addition, there is truth to the idea that some right-wing extremist groups have used the term "free speech" to promote hateful ideologies (Sultana 2018); some students in the current study have experienced this first-hand. ...
... I also found that both liberals and conservatives in my sample supported speech restrictions, and only libertarians were overwhelmingly unsupportive of speech restrictions. Although this trend may have been due to the small number of conservative and libertarian students, Binder and Kidder (2022) also found libertarianism to be an important ideology in shaping attitudes toward free speech. Interestingly, Binder and Kidder's study noted that many of their libertarian students also identified as conservative, while the libertarian participants in my study identified either exclusively as libertarian or as libertarian-left. ...
Freedom of speech has long been considered an essential value in democracies. However, its boundaries concerning hate speech continue to be contested across many social and political spheres, including governments, social media, and university campuses. Despite the potential of examining the social psychological dynamics of this debate for advancing theory on meaning-making, polarization, emotions, and social status, empirical research in this area is scarce. This dissertation aims to address this gap by examining first-hand perspectives and media frames on the free speech and hate speech debate using digital, archival, and interview data from an online forum and four university campuses.
The first empirical chapter focuses on the moral discourse of individuals within an online free speech community. I analyze 418 discussion posts on the r/FreeSpeech subreddit using a digital ethnographic approach and find that most users understand free speech in an absolutist sense but differ in their justifications for why hate speech should be allowed. The study highlights the variation in free speech discourse within online spaces.
The second empirical chapter explores campus culture and students’ meaning-making processes toward speech on campus at four large public universities in the U.S. and Canada. The chapter, which draws on data from 150 student newspaper articles and 55 semi-structured interviews with students, finds the culture on each of the four campuses to be polarized around free speech issues. However, interview participants express complex and sometimes conflicting meaning-making processes, particularly around the concept of “harm,” theories about speech and how it spreads, and the roles and responsibilities of universities in society. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that the campus free speech debate is neatly divided along ideological or moral lines.
The third empirical chapter investigates how social status shapes university students’ experiences of campus speech. I draw on the same interview data and find that lower-status students express a high degree of fear and anxiety about expressing themselves openly on a range of politicized topics, including free speech itself. This self-censorship negatively impacts lower-status students’ educational experiences, sense of belonging, and professional aspirations.
... Research has documented the critical role of college for nurturing students' social engagement activities [11,17,45]. Students still enter college with excitement for the opportunities to get involved, to meet others, to live on their own, to affect change around them. ...
... Student activism on and off campus is yet another critical influence on students' growth as engaged citizens. Recent research reports on a "revival of student activism" [21] reflected in nation-wide protests against racism and sexism, controversial speakers, campus policies, war conflicts, and failures to protect the environment as well as increased engagement in political campaigns [11,17,29,45,57]. Student activism strongly contributes to the development of skills and understanding of engaged citizenship, and an active civic life [10,36,54,63]. ...
This study assesses the civic orientation of graduate students via the “Importance of Social Action Engagement” scale and tests that instrument’s construct validity and reliability when applied to graduate students. The study contributes to our understanding of the levels of graduate students’ willingness to engage with social issues, and to our ability to gauge those levels. The study’s results, based on a sample of 367 survey responses, reports on moderate levels of civic orientation amongst graduate students, and provides evidence of the construct validity and reliability of the instrument items when used with graduate students, and the overall instruments’ effectiveness in the initial exploration of graduate students’ orientation towards social engagement. The results offer useful feedback to graduate student program directors and faculty on the need to incorporate learning initiatives that actively engage their students with social issues, and suggest a viable tool to measure students’ civic orientation.
... In a small number of cases, we interviewed scholars who described themselves as having libertarian political views, but said that their research was not aligned with any libertarian-leaning subfields within their disciplines. We conducted the majority of these interviews between spring 2022 and spring 2023, but we also make use of four interviews with organization leaders and libertarian scholars that were conducted during previous projects on campus politics (Binder and Kidder 2022;Binder and Wood 2014), which are useful for commenting on how these organizations' tactics have changed over time. ...
... Currently more focused on "supporting graduate students, scholars, and intellectuals who are driving human progress," IHS historically has fostered entry points into libertarian thought for undergraduates, which its staff specifically referred to as a "pipeline." Much as Binder and Wood (2014) and Binder and Kidder (2022) showed that an outside organizational channel has been built to mobilize conservative college students into political activism, IHS has provided outside resources and experiences tailored to collegians interested in studying libertarian thought. In this way, IHS plays an essential role in the idea pipeline by explicitly wanting to ensure a flow of aspiring libertarian scholars. ...
In this article, the authors draw on the literatures about academic career pipelines and the sociology of ideas to understand how an outside group of organizations provides resources to aspiring scholars as young as high schoolers and as senior as emeriti professors. One of the goals of these organizations is to promote libertarian ideas in the academy. The authors show how, in contrast to other academic pipeline building, libertarian-leaning organizations fear that their perspectives encounter resistance in the progressive field of higher education. Therefore, to keep libertarian ideas alive, they pursue strategies to guarantee a supply of graduate students for eventual academic jobs and provide professors with relatively easy access to funding, granting them autonomy vis-à-vis their home institutions. This funding may be used in part for programs that specifically hire libertarian PhDs, which in turn provide young scholars with a step ladder into the academy. The authors call this set of strategies an “idea pipeline.” On the whole, these efforts are designed to make a career studying libertarian ideas more desirable and viable for those inclined toward these viewpoints and to ward off the demise of libertarian thought in the academy.
... The data for this paper derive primarily from 46 semi-structured interviews with graduate students (N = 6) and professors (N = 40) connected to academically oriented libertarian-leaning organizations (e.g., the Cato Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies, Liberty Fund, etc.). We also interviewed 11 representatives from such organizations. 2 We did the bulk of our data gathering between Spring 2022 and Spring 2023, but we also draw on six past interviews from our previous research into campus politics (Binder and Kidder 2022;Binder and Wood 2013). With this new project we made use of video conferencing (opposed to relying solely on face-to-face meetings) to extend the geographic range of the sample. ...
This paper examines how graduate students and professors talk about the funding they receive from libertarian-leaning organizations. Building from cultural economic sociologists’ insights on relational work, we analyze the meaning of money—in this case, politically controversial donations and grants—from the perspective of scholars who are supported by these types of funds. We integrate concepts from the organizational management literature on stigmatized job tasks to examine the discursive strategies scholars use to “normalize” the “contestable currency” they receive. Our theoretical synthesis allows for a nuanced understanding of how ideologically-based funding in higher education precipitates complex negotiations about the meaning of quality scholarship in higher education today.
... Student manipulation by non-student actors should not be restricted to those within higher education institutions since students can be manipulated by partisan and state actors as well. Binder and Kidder's (2022) analysis of US student politics reveals complex networks of partisan think tanks, foundations, political parties, and interest groups that use students in proxy battles of larger culture wars, pumping large amounts of money into puppet student organizations and setting up career pipelines to replenish their ranks with fresh graduates. Other policymakers apply student partnership approaches by recruiting token appointed student and/or youth councils to circumvent consultation with elected representatives from national and international student governments (Patrick, 2022). ...
Two competing approaches dominate student leadership literature: student representation consisting of elected student governments, and student partnerships consisting of appointed students working closely with educational leaders. This article responds to critiques of student representation outlined in Matthews and Dollinger’s (Higher Education, 2022) article in Higher Education and reframes the student representation-student partnership dichotomy within the context of power relations in education systems. An interdisciplinary critique of student partnership approaches is provided to demonstrate that they inherently risk corruption, patronage, tokenism, and ageism, drawing from definitions and studies pertaining to these terms in political science and social psychology. Populism scholarship is applied to student representation contexts to illustrate how student representation in itself is not problematic but rather how it has been implemented, and that populism in student representation can be reduced through liberal democratic safeguards that improve effectiveness, equity, and inclusion. A case is made about the importance of students having structural power within education decision-making instead of relying on the informality some student partnership approaches support. A framework to measure student power is provided by adapting Roger Hart’s Ladder of Children’s Participation theory to higher education contexts, so all student voice approaches plus their hybrids and subtypes can be evaluated comparatively.
Objective: To examine the association between subjective polarization and mental health among college students, and to investigate if the association is due to impacts on social relationships and school belonging. Participants: The current study used online survey data for 311 college students collected in May 2023. Methods: OLS regression analyses assess associations among polarization, psychological distress, social connectedness, sense of belonging, and feelings of social ease on campus. KHB mediation models test for significant mediation. Results: The findings confirm that subjective polarization is negatively associated with student mental health, with an estimated effect size comparable to socioeconomic status. Social connectedness and belonging are significant mediators of the association; social ease is not. Conclusions: The results highlight the need for interventions that foster transpartisan and inclusive campus environments.
The authors describe protest patterns at U.S. and Canadian universities in the 2010s. The research draws on a new dataset, the Higher Ed Protest Event Dataset, which combines machine learning and sociological hand coding of 16,069 campus newspaper articles. The sample consists of 5,553 higher ed protests involving 584 universities and colleges between 2012 and 2018. The dataset also includes university and police responses to a subset of protests. The authors find that protest frequency is patterned by the academic calendar. The top issue in both U.S. and Canadian higher education protests was university administration and governance. The comparative analysis reveals distinctive patterns in other issues raised and protest intensity. In the United States, the periods of greatest protest activity were waves of mass mobilization across the country on often racialized issues with a national dimension: racist police violence, racially hostile campus climates, and Donald Trump’s presidency. In Canada, protest activity was most intense during provincial or local campaigns led by formal student organizations and unions on issues of economic security: public tuition, austerity, and labor conditions. Across both countries, university administrations and police usually avoided extensive intervention during protests. The findings contribute to social movements research through methodological innovations and new empirical insights on movements in higher education.
Research on political performance has typically addressed macro-level performances, such as highly visible protests and demonstrations from progressive organizations. Using ethnographic data from various conservative organizations in Southern Nevada, I demonstrate how conservatives perform their ideology with a small-scale, generally like-minded audience. The activists I observed strategically created places filled with conservative symbolism to demonstrate the ideas and practices they welcome and support. They embodied a conservative style through their self-presentation, signaling their political commitments. They perform their ideology through the talk they engage in with others in the political spaces. I pay particular attention to the role of place in ideological performances, detailing how activists strategically create and transform ordinary spaces into conservative places, setting a specific tone, mood, and message for their performances, and enhancing participants’ experiences. In these conservative places, activists display and forge their collective identity, demarcate boundaries between themselves and others, and sustain their participation.
Activism inherently involves emotional engagement, often stemming from personal experiences, connections to the issue, or fuelled by emotions like anger, frustration, and a drive for positive social change. This article builds upon Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour, expanding its scope to encompass the emotional dimensions of activism among college students. We delve into the lived experiences of 67 college student activists in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA, uncovering the emotional impetuses driving their activism, the challenges of activist burnout resulting from their emotional labour, and the strategies employed to navigate its emotional toll. By analysing the emotional narratives shared by these student activists, this article seeks to contribute to the understanding of academics and practitioners by constructing a comprehensive framework that illuminates how emotions affect their activism toward effecting transformative social change.
This chapter – offered by the co-editors – situates the need for “Supporting College Students of Immigrant Origin: New Insights from Research, Policy, and Practice” in both historical and contemporary social, political, and cultural contexts. It also offers a blueprint for how a range of higher education stakeholders can engage with the volume and its individual chapters, which are organized into four distinct parts that chronologically trace students of immigrant origin’s journeys as they relate to higher education.
How do characteristics of colleges and universities shape campus activism? In this review article, we provide an overview of the growing body of sociological research on educational opportunity structures at U.S. colleges and universities. Specifically, we synthesize research that discusses how various characteristics of U.S. colleges and universities—including their public or private status, their secular or religious identity, their wealth, their prestige, their residential character, their bureaucratic rules, and their administrators’ openness to campus activism—influence whether student activist groups emerge, adopt different forms, and achieve their goals. We conclude by discussing remaining gaps in our knowledge and highlighting several potential lines for future research.
College students and campuses have played key roles in social movements because colleges' cultural and structural features tend to facilitate movements. But such attributes vary across campuses. This quantitative study models how two campus features that correspond to core elements of social movement theory—students' collective identity strength and social network density—appear to impact United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) groups' presence and success on 1,265 US 4‐year public and private nonprofit campuses during 2000–2006, operationalizing success as schools' joining the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) monitoring organization. Results generally indicate that collective identity strength and network density promote USAS presence and that network density facilitates WRC membership. USAS presence is pivotal, though not required, for WRC membership. Our logistic regression models also confirm that campus opportunity structures and off‐campus movement actors' roles help account for these USAS outcomes; notably, antiunion location (“Right‐to‐Work” states) undermines and Roman Catholic school affiliation encourages USAS presence and success. We identify theoretically why certain factors may promote only some forms of student activism (e.g., conscience constituent but not beneficiary‐based groups).
This article provides key considerations regarding the tensions within collaboratively constructing purposes to push for equity; complicating how equity is impacted by power, labor, and larger systems of oppression; and recommendations for how to better support students, student leaders, educational leaders, and ultimately the campus.
How prevalent are Republican and Democratic student groups, and why are some schools home to Republican and Democratic student groups while other schools are not? Some commentators and scholars suggest that Republican student groups may be less prevalent than Democratic student groups and, when present, will likely be found at “red schools” (rather than “blue schools”) in Republican‐leaning areas of the country. However, other scholars argue that both Republican and Democratic student groups should be similar in their overall prevalence and located at a similar set of “engaged schools” (as opposed to “unengaged schools”). Analyzing our original database of Republican and Democratic student organizations across 1,953 four‐year, not‐for‐profit U.S. colleges and universities, we first show that Republican student groups are nearly as common as Democratic student groups: Republican student groups can be found at 39% of campuses, while Democratic student groups are present on 40% of campuses. Employing binary and multinomial logistic regression analyses, we then show that Republican and Democratic student groups tend to be located at the same types of schools, that is, larger, wealthier, public schools that offer political science majors. Our article holds significant implications for theorizing on student organization presence more generally.
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