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Welfare state retrenchment in advanced industrialized countries seeks to expand market-like logics in public services, based on the assumption that public services benefit from non-state initiative and competition. This logic gained a stronghold in policymaking, but its implementation nevertheless struggled to find acceptance. Public university tuition is one such case where policymakers aimed to increase investment in human capital through cost sharing. While students in some countries accept them as a necessary evil, opposition arises in others. Students in Germany and Turkey took to the streets in support of tuition-free higher education. Despite differences in their political contexts and the differential mediating role political culture plays, student mobilization reversed right-wing parties' policies. This article focuses on how opposition to tuition policies is covered by the news in both countries. Using a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling with qualitative analysis, I show that student protests and tuition policy discussions are reported separately. In both countries, student protests involving confrontation were highlighted whereas reports on institutional actors dominated policy discussions. However, when movements pressure political parties to “own” an issue in their platform, party endorsement subsequently amplifies issue salience even if movement organizations and parties are not covered together by the media. This indicates an indirect effect of movements' collective action on news coverage. Political party endorsements mediate the amount of coverage movement issues receive. This finding provides insights into how opposition to welfare state retrenchment might navigate difficulties in closed media cultures that heavily favor institutional actors.

In this chapter, I will first conceptualize social movement theory before examining the importance of student movements and student activism. I then will link social movement theory to the university in Egypt. Next, I will contextualize university activism by describing the authoritarian structures of Egypt’s university system. Then, using secondary data sources, I will characterize university activism during the three transitional political periods (under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SACF), under President Morsi, and after the ousting of Morsi), and conclude with a discussion on the implications of student activism on future university reform.

This chapter examines the complex influences of globalization on higher education in the United States, and specifically considers how globalization has increased the international influence of American college and university student movements. We briefly describe various conceptions of globalization and look at the ways in which a capitalist-oriented form of globalization is infringing upon the social good purpose of higher education. This chapter primarily focuses on “globalization from below,” the ways that oppositional social movements, in this case led by students, use the mechanisms of globalization to promote social equity within, through and beyond higher education. Using the cases of the anti-sweatshop movement and the Sudan divestment movement, this chapter examines how student activists use mechanisms of globalization, particularly global economic connections and technology, to counter aspects of neoliberal globalization, and promote justice and democratization for marginalized people throughout the world.

Drawing on debates on deliberative and participatory democracy, I argue that social movements can be considered to be promoting democratization when they are able to compel governments to increase effective participation in the policy-making process, and/or when their democratic claims are translated into an agenda and/or policy impact. This indicates that a social movement has increased the responsiveness of the government it is challenging. Based on this premise, in this paper, I trace the political impact of the Student Movement in Chile. Spearheading the largest protests since the reinstatement of democracy, in 2006, and most notably, in 2011, the Student Movement forced a debate on education and political reforms, and a series of policies to address these issues. The analysis is grounded on more than 50 interviews, and an exhaustive analysis of organizational documents and newspaper data. The case examined in this paper illustrates how the expansion of political opportunities that is necessary for pursuing democratizing reforms not only is driven “from above,” but also “from below.” Studying this process, social movement scholarship can learn a great deal from recent cases of social mobilization in Latin America. These experiences also call for more attention to the role of social movements in democratization studies.

Contributing to the literature on movement structure in authoritarian regimes, this analysis focuses on the structure of two Iranian movements. We use a multi-method approach to analyze the organization of the student and women’s movements in Iran between 1997 and 2008. From 1997 to 2004, a reform government opened political opportunities. The period between 2005 and 2008 was characterized by increased repression. The student movement was organized during the first period as a hybrid composed of several networks linked in a federal structure. As the political context changed, the movement became less centralized. Its strategy shifted from one based in alliance with governing reformers to coalition building outside of the regime. In contrast, the women’s movement was organized as a densely linked web of noncentralized campaigns. The women’s movement overcame divisions as political opportunities closed in the mid-2000s and built a grassroots strategy during the latter part of the decade.

Social movement scholars conventionally neglect high school students and settings. This elision stems in part from the fallacious assumption that high schools constitute a segment of society traditionally immune to conflict and in equal part from a failure to appreciate the political agency of high school-aged youth. When scholars do concern themselves with youth social movements, they tend to privilege large-scale, epochal protests on college campuses. In this study, however, we document a significant level of “social movement behavior” among actors who rarely see the light of scholarly print: suburban high school students.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

Research universities are recognized as primary sources of the knowledge essential to the development of innovative solutions to a wide range of economic, social, and ecological problems that affect humankind. This utilitarian function of American higher education dates back to the creation of land grant institutions with the passing of the Morrill Act of 1862 (Lucas, 1994; Veysey, 1965). The prominent higher education historian John R. Thelin (2004) described the importance of this land grant legislation by stating, “Its institutional legacy was the accessible state college and university, characterized by a curriculum that was broad and utilitarian” (p. 76). Shifts in the research paradigm that followed the World War II placed further emphasis on applied research that was to be “directed toward some individual or group or societal need or use” (Stokes, 1997, p. 8). Most recently, the utilitarian function of higher education has become closely linked to the commercialization of knowledge and discovery. Specifically, the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allowed colleges and universities to take ownership of intellectual properties created in part or in full through federal funding, allowed the transfer of knowledge from higher education to society through market channels to become standard practice.

The Printemps Érable has become a landmark event in the history of Québec’s student movement. The Printemps Érable protesters expressed demands on several fronts, including the freezing of tuition fees, free education, the preservation of a just and universal student loans and bursaries programme, the right of access to higher education for all the province’s youth and freedom of association. The 2012 movement echoed protests in the 1950s. This chapter provides an overview of the history of student protest over fees and access to higher education in Québec and considers its implications for student struggles more widely. The Printemps Érable ultimately led to the freezing of tuition fees. It also ensured the preservation of the universal student loan and bursary programme, and reaffirmed the students’ right to free association. This chapter gives an historical overview of the student protest movement in Quebec, and ponders its impact on student struggles everywhere.