At the End of a Watershed Year, Can Student Activists Sustain Momentum?

After final exams ended this month at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, most students left for the summer — including many of those who had led protests of the campus’s racial climate over the previous six months. But not Kenneth Cole.

Mr. Cole, a senior who plans to take a fifth year of classes, is continuing an internship with United Council, the Wisconsin system’s statewide student organization. In the meantime, he is starting to prepare next year’s agenda for UW BlackOut, the activist group he helped found last fall.

UW BlackOut released a list of demands in the fall focused on making the campus more inclusive to students of color. It followed up with another set focused on police reform this spring, after a black student was arrested in a Madison classroom. At least one key demand has been met, but by staying on this summer, Mr. Cole hopes to learn more about the ins and outs of student governance and university bureaucracy so he and other activists can make further progress.

“One thing they’re counting on is that students will take the summer to relax,” he says of administrators at his campus and the system level. But he has big plans. Among them: bringing back many of his peers for a series of workshops led by alumni who protested similar racial-climate issues when they were students.

Over a tempestuous six weeks last fall, a wave of antiracism protests swept dozens of colleges. Nationwide, sit-ins and rallies drew hundreds of people; by late fall, a website had published demands from students at nearly 80 institutions. Most were inspired by students at the University of Missouri at Columbia who protested under the name Concerned Student 1950. Their tent encampment and one student’s hunger strike drew national attention to the campus’s racial climate and helped push the university system’s president and campus chancellor to step down.

Those resignations were seen as big wins for the Missouri protesters. On other campuses, students like Mr. Cole succeeded in getting administrators to pledge to meet many of their demands; the Wisconsin system, for instance, has created a new racial-climate task force. Now campus activists confront a fresh challenge: sustaining momentum into a new academic year.

Many of the leaders who defined the campus-protest movement are graduating this spring. Their departures have left activists to worry that college presidents who said they would tackle issues like faculty diversity and funding for multicultural groups might be tempted to wait the protests out. So students are shifting their focus. Where they once worked to draw attention, they’re now trying to lay the groundwork for long-term influence.

They are also encouraged that they are now working shoulder to shoulder with their former adversaries. Many activists have joined administrators on task forces and in working groups, strategizing with campus leaders over the best path forward. The underclassmen who are trying to push activist movements forward must learn how to navigate academic bureaucracy, and they face a steep learning curve.

“Now that we have had the protests and the administration knows we want to share governance, what’s the next step?” says Maxwell Little, a member of Concerned Student 1950 who will graduate this month with a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy analysis. “It’s about showing up to meetings.”

‘We’ll Be Sitting at the Table’

Mr. Little and other student activists at Mizzou have little fear that their organizations will fall apart over the summer. The university was the site of some of the country’s most intense campus protests last year, when Concerned Student 1950 issued a list of demands that included an increase in black faculty members and more resources for student mental-health services.

But student leaders remain busy. This spring Chuck Henson, the interim vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity, and equity, convened a working group in which Mr. Little and other student leaders brainstormed about how to improve the campus’s racial climate. “You have to come prepared and engage in meaningful dialogue and push your agenda,” Mr. Little says.

The group got off to a tense start, he says. Some students complained that it amounted to little more than a series of lectures from administrators. Concerned Student 1950 members pushed back, Mr. Little says, and “the next meeting, we were all sharing ideas and valuable discussion.”

Now that graduation is over, he and other student leaders plan to work remotely to help turn Concerned Student 1950, which began as a collective of about a dozen students, into a formal organization with bylaws and a structure. That, he says, will help the group prepare for the fall, when members hope to draw attention back to goals that were sidelined by talk of state budget cuts, including the demands for mental-health services and faculty diversity. This summer and fall, he says, “we’ll be sitting at the table to make sure those demands are met.”

Rhodesia McMillian, a doctoral student in educational leadership and policy analysis, says her group, MU Policy Now, plans to remain active on diversity and equity issues, including a push for graduate students to be allowed to unionize.

“There’s no longer pressure in terms of ‘they’re not listening to us,’” she says. “We’re actually being heard.”

This summer Ms. McMillian, a school psychologist, will work with Mr. Henson, the interim vice chancellor, to help Missouri send the message to all of the state’s schoolchildren that the campus welcomes people from diverse backgrounds.

But not all student activists feel the administration has invited their views. Danielle Walker, who formed a loose coalition last fall called Racism Lives Here, declined to join the working group because she believes such groups are created “to delay action.”

“I refuse to be a part of them,” says Ms. Walker, who is finishing her master’s in public policy. “And because of my refusal, I was considered problematic.” Instead she worked this spring to make her group more inclusive. “Everything that happened last semester was so focused on black students, a lot of other students of color really felt left out of this narrative,” she says.

Ms. Walker is training another student to carry on the coalition’s work after she leaves, planning events for the summer and setting the agenda for the fall. That includes advocating for a stronger response to hate crimes, and for more diversity in homecoming events. She hopes incoming students “are even more active than students last semester, even more demanding, even more impassioned and determined.”

Recruiting Challenges

Graduation is a significant obstacle for campus activism. Finding ways to keep the momentum going when the core leaders are graduating seniors has always been a challenge, says Angus Johnston, a historian of American student movements who teaches at the City University of New York’s Hostos Community College.

All of the founders of Claremont McKenna College’s six-month-old CMCers of Color, which pushed the college’s dean of students to resign, in November, were seniors. And campus criticism of student protests has hurt activists’ ability to attract younger students, says Denys Reyes, a founding member. “There have been a lot of new students who have approached me and said, I really want to be part of this movement of students of color. I’m just afraid I’ll get harassed,” Ms. Reyes says.

Still, she says, the organization has recruited a passionate group of underclassmen to lead next year.

When Ms. Reyes and other group members were leading protests last fall, she says, “it was like working full time while going to school full time.” That limited students’ ability to strategize with other campus activists nearby. “It would be like running a nonprofit to coordinate all of these student organizers,” she says.

Ms. Reyes gives mixed reviews to the administration’s progress on students’ demands. This fall Claremont McKenna will open a new resource center for cultural-affinity groups. The center, however, will share one floor of a building with both career services and the student government, she says.

The college has also developed small grants for professors who want to diversify their course curricula, and officials are in the process of hiring a new dean of diversity and inclusion. But students’ request for a general-education requirement centered on ethnic studies has gone nowhere, Ms. Reyes says.

Keeping Up the Pressure

By putting their demands in writing and asking for written responses, this year’s wave of activists may have done next year’s protesters a favor. Shaun R. Harper, executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, says there is now “a record of some of the assurances that have been made to student activists and students of color.”

“The onus is on college presidents and others to offer, in a proactive fashion, updates for the entire campus community,” Mr. Harper says.

That appears to be happening on some campuses. In the fall, students at Amherst College who organized under the name Amherst Uprising issued a confrontational list of demands. The protesters ended a sit-in in November and agreed to work with the college’s president, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, on the campus’s racial climate.

Kyndall Ashe, a sophomore and lead organizer, is one of three students who sit on a presidential task force on diversity and inclusion, which met weekly this semester. The task force will continue next fall, the president says.

Participating in working groups and committees is a good strategy for student activists, says Mr. Harper. Meaningful change will require their continued pressure, he says.

“Students are smart enough to realize when institutions are simply giving them the runaround,” Mr. Harper says.

Amherst students hope to hold monthly, campuswide forums next fall to discuss the task force’s work and get student feedback. “Having a president who’s on board and so supportive of us has really helped,” Ms. Ashe says. Through Facebook, Twitter, and campus meetings, “we’re going to continue doing everything we can to keep the conversation going.”

Some graduating seniors have offered to try to rally support among alumni, who were deeply divided over the group’s demands, and to be “a support system and resource” for next year’s activists, says Ms. Ashe.

National Groups Step In

Over the course of the academic year, many protest groups expanded their missions: Activists may now ask campus leaders to disinvest in fossil-fuel companies, provide higher wages to campus workers, and offer better mental-health services.

That’s an ambitious set of goals. “Students are aware that they’re not going to be able to finish their agenda in one academic year,” says Mr. Johnston, the historian. “So this semester, students focused on how to build something that’s going to be a multiyear effort.”

That means identifying students who could become leaders in two or three years and providing mentoring and training. The United States Student Association does that, he says, by having the vice president each year shadow the president and take over that spot when the president leaves. The national association, which operates year-round and has about 1.5 million members in 10 states, also provides tips and tactics for campus organizers on its website.

The Black Liberation Collective, a nationwide group of organizers that has become a coordinating hub for far-flung student activists, is adopting elements of that approach. It did most of its work this year through Twitter, Tumblr, and conference calls with campus groups, but its structure is becoming more formal, says Yamiesha Bell, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut who is one of the collective’s 10 founding members.

The collective created regional chapters this spring, Ms. Bell says, and each member of the national leadership is responsible for keeping up with the needs of his or her region. Several of the chapters are in Canada. “Seeing how social media was able to push this out of our country is really fantastic,” Ms. Bell says.

In April the collective jointly sponsored a national day of action with Million Student March, a campaign focused on college affordability and student debt. Coordinating with other student-activist movements is one of the collective’s strategies for achieving longevity and for making progress on a list of national demands, which include divestment from private-prison companies.

The collective’s leaders are arranging activism workshops in each region, and the group hopes soon to hold webinars for students who can’t attend the training sessions in person. Eventually, Ms. Bell says, the collective wants to sponsor a national conference for black student activists.

“A lot of students have what it takes, just not the tools and confidence,” she says. “That’s where we come in — to really push that.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

Correction (6/17/2016, 1:39 p.m.): This article originally stated that Claremont McKenna College would pay stipends to some students who lead multicultural campus groups. The college and student sources both later confirmed that the college would not offer such stipends.