Neoliberalism and the Demeaning of Student Movements

• Published in: We Demand Vol. 1; p. 68
• Main Author: Ferguson, Roderick A
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: United States University of California Press 25.04.2017
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Academic communities; Applied psychology; Behavioral sciences; College students; Disabilities; Economic liberalism; Economic theory; Economics; Education; Educational institutions; Educational psychology; Formal education; Gender studies; Government; Government services; Health sciences; Human societies; Law enforcement; Medical conditions; Police; Political science; Psychology; Queer studies; School campuses; Schools; Social movements; Social sciences; Sociology; Special needs students; Student behavior; Student movements; Student protests; Students; Universities
• ISBN: 9780520293007; 0520293002
• DOI: 10.1525/9780520966284-006

The “educational danger” of student movements—to reformulate Howard Zinn’s phrase¹—lies in their capacity to produce insurgencies, insurgencies that are created by connecting social formations and processes that are supposed to be understood as disparate. We may understand student movements as efforts to illustrate the connections among systems of power that arose between academy, government, and corporation. The previous chapter used the increasing visibility of minoritized communities to explain the social ruptures that student and social movements produced in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; this chapter looks at how systems of power have responded to those movements by demeaning