Student Occupation, Coming to a Campus Near You

It’s the form of protest that brings student activists, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, to university buildings with stacks of supplies and padlocks for the doors. Occupation has in recent years become the protest method of choice for students.

At Howard University, more than 400 students occupied the halls of the main administration building for eight days starting on March 29 while negotiating their demands with trustees. At no point did officials attempt to remove students from the building or otherwise intervene. Instead, the occupation — which was driven by housing complaints but grew to encompass a number of issues — led to days of negotiations with top university officials and tangible responses to some of the demands. The university’s president, whose resignation was one of the protesters’ initial demands, even congratulated them on their hard work when the sit-in concluded.

Occupations like the one at Howard are part of a larger trend, said Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism who teaches at the City University of New York’s Hostos Community College. After a wave of student sit-ins in the 1980s and ‘90s, such protests slowed down until 2009, when students in California occupied several public university campuses over two months in a series of strikes against steep tuition increases.

Campus occupations grew increasingly common until 2011. That November, video and images of police officers at the University of California at Davis misting passively protesting students with pepper spray generated outrage. Occupation-style protests tapered off, Johnston said, because students feared harsh retaliation. In recent years, because of the incident at Davis and elsewhere, he said, a new taboo took hold against forceful police responses to passive student protests. That spurred another shift.

“In the last couple of years, we are seeing this form of protest is beginning to make a comeback,” Johnston said. “There is this concern about optics. And one of the big questions is always going to be how much sympathy outsiders and members of the campus community have for the students engaging in these tactics.”

Howard student activists were widely lauded for their social-media strategy and level of organization in creating and distributing the demands, and in forming a system of decision-making among activists as well as developing classes and activities for those within the occupied building’s walls all week. It worked. Some current and former students criticized the action, but the protesters received wide-ranging support from alumni, some of whom donated supplies and meals to the occupiers. More broadly, even many without connections to the university took an interest in the historic show of activism. It was the longest occupation to take place at Howard.

Reputation at Stake

When activists have community support and the wider public starts to pay attention, Johnston said, “this narrows the options of the administration a lot.” Students suddenly hold the university’s reputation in their hands.

Now that Howard activists have tasted the success of occupation, they say it’s a threat they’ll always have in their back pocket.

“If the university doesn’t uphold their side of the agreement, people are already talking about a part two,” said Maya McCollum, a student at Howard. “We don’t have to get the Howard run-around when we go to administrators now. Whether it’s respect or they’re just scared we’ll occupy the building again, I don’t know.”

On the last day of the Howard occupation, the institution’s president, Wayne A.I. Frederick, thanked the protesters, saying they had carried on a tradition of activism. The response by Frederick and the university to the protest hews closely to the advice of a music professor at UC-Davis who wrote a widely circulated op-ed after the 2011 clash on that campus.

Bob Ostertag presented an alternate history of how the handling of the protest could’ve gone: “To begin with, the chancellor could have thanked them for their sense of civic duty. The occupation could have been turned into a teach-in on the role of public education in this country. There could have been a call for professors to hold classes on the quad. The list of ‘other options’ is endless.”

Howard administrators aren’t the only ones seeking alternatives to a police response in the face of student occupations. Johnston pointed to the restraint shown last week by New York University, which has historically responded firmly to protesters. When activists occupied the Center for Student Life, the administration did everything short of calling the police or engaging with students physically to quell the protest. Students say their parents even got calls from administrators warning of possible consequences.

And if Howard serves as an example, occupations can bring not only an optical advantage, but success. Students claimed that eight of their nine demands had been met, forcing the university’s hand in changing a housing deadline, putting students in advisory positions, and making a recommendation to the governing board that tuition rates be held flat for the next year.

Students didn’t quite get all they’d asked for — like the disclosure of administrators’ salaries (Howard is a private institution) and the disarmament of the campus police — but the university took at least partial action on all of the demands except the one for the president’s resignation.

How Activists Get Results

“It’s smart to ask for more than you think you can get, to be ambitious and aggressive about it,” Johnston said, describing a common phenomenon in student activism. “It’s not just that it’s frequent for students to claim victory even if they haven’t won all of their demands, it’s appropriate. You go in knowing you’re not going to get everything.” This is also helpful in their social-media strategy, because big, clear demands catch attention and communicate more clearly.

Occupations are often the result of longstanding battles with administrators. At Howard, students had been complaining about housing conditions for months, and other concerns have a much longer history.

In the case of Texas State University, protesters took over the student center last week to fight what they call minority oppression at the university. Student activists said they decided to occupy the building because, over the course of months, a roundtable meeting and private sessions with the administration had generated no results. “We’ve had these conversations and they know what we want. At this point, we’re really tired of it and we need our demands met now,” Tafari Robertson, a Texas State student, told The University Star, the student newspaper.

Unlike other popular forms of protests, like die-ins, many occupation-style protests intentionally call back to the 1960s. When 300 students at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point occupied the administration building after 13 majors were eliminated in March, it was the first of its kind there since the Vietnam War era. Similarly, Howard students summoned the memory of figures from the civil-rights movement during last week’s occupation.

“It’s been 50 years since there was a very big 1968 occupation at Howard, and the students sitting-in there now are very aware of that, making reference to that, and are building on that tradition in an explicit way,” Johnston said.

Such references, he said, only strengthen the power of this method of student protest. In combination with that tactic, if students can capitalize on an incident people are already talking about on campus and beyond, he said, occupations can galvanize people’s action on broader, systemic issues.