Is It Easier to Gain Protest Support in a College Town?

The protests in Madison, Wisc., that continue after over a week and a half are about politics and maneuvering and budgets and truculent gambits. But they are also about unions and teachers and families and pride. Mostly, it turns out, broken down to the dry skeletal structure at the nexus of the issue, they are about students.

Not only are students of all ages affected indirectly by the outcome of the Budget Repair Bill vote that would change certain functionality of the teachers’ union, students are the heart of the protests in such an integral way that demonstrations of this intensity and attention would be an enormous fail were Madison not an enormous college town.

During the '60s and '70s college campuses such as U.C.-Berkeley and, yes, University of Wisconsin-Madison served as staging areas for war protests. But something has changed in the last 30 years and the activism of the Baby Boom generation has been replaced by the apathy of the Millennial Generation.

At least, that’s what we were told.

Almost three years ago, Saturday Night Magazine ran a story in which they asked “Why are college campuses, which once acted as hotbeds for political protest and birthplaces for new ideas, enabling the voice of America’s youth, so eerily quiet? Why are on-campus demonstrations so rare?”

Film Studies professor Russell Merritt, who began his career at UW before moving to teach at Berkeley suggested, “My sense among today’s students is that they are as anti-war as ever, but have lost confidence in public protest as an effective persuader.”

While a valid point, Merritt’s hypothesis turned out not to be true when, last year at UCLA, students rallied against tuition hikes.

As Arne Duncan, United States Secretary of Education, wrote, “As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue, legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges, in turn, answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes. Ultimately, states are resolving short-term crises by undermining long-term investment in future generations.”

It turns out that Millennials are more activists than their predecessors; they just invest their energy in education and future rather than peace and love.

A compelling piece from Campus Progress outlined how all ages of students continue to work together to make the protests possible. High schoolers marched alongside their teachers; undergrads banged drums and blocked the entrance to the State Senate; and the (awkwardly named) Teachers Assistants Association rallied speakers to testify, even waking protesters in the middle of the night.

Were the Budget Repair Bill first proposed in Indianapolis or Salt Lake City (both cities house college, but are by no means college towns) the outcry might be present, but the protests and support would most certainly not be along for the ride.

What is happening in Madison is happening because, and could not possibly happen without, students.