The Contentious Politics of Higher Education. Students as Political Actors in Times of Crisis

Abstract

University students have traditionally engaged in contentious collective action. New generations of political leaders have emerged out of the student movement, often associated to broader hopes of renewal and regeneration. The events of 1968 show students as an actor committed to a program of progressive change that included the fight against bureaucratism, oppression and imperialism. In many countries the active role of students in politics and society dates further back in history. But education has traditionally been a contentious issue. Indeed, one of the core demands of popular movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all over the world was to ensure access to educational programs for children and the youth. But while former student movements fought for universalize access and connect educational institutions to their social environment, recent student protests challenge a distinctive set of policy reforms. Since the advent of neoliberalism in the 1980s, politicians and policy makers in the advanced and the developing world have proposed a major shift in the paradigm that informed education policies during most of the twentieth century. Drawing on the assumption that the private-sector approach is superior to the public-sector approach, the new paradigm promotes the “discipline of the market place, the power of the consumer and the engine of the competition” as defining principles for the provision of education (McGettigan 2013). But besides, or in parallel to these trends, in some countries the disruptive potential of student activism has been more visible in their challenges to what they consider authoritarian modes of political power. Here students act as a democratizing force that pushes for the opening of institutions to groups and classes excluded from decision-making centers. Several recent episodes of massive student protests in Europe, Latin America and Africa, and the key role of students in broader protest movements in North America (Occupy Wall Street) and the Middle East (e.g. Arab Spring), point at the question of whether we assist to a new surge of student movements. Against this backdrop, this panel discusses and analyses the role of student activism in contemporary societies. It focuses on the characteristics, causes, consequences and implications of student political participation in recent times, in a variety of countries that represent diverse historical, geographical and socio-political contexts.

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