Student Movements and the Power of Disruption

By Gabriela Gonzalez-Vaillant and Michael Schwartz 

Student movements have played a crucial role in many major social and political transformations, at least partially because of their unique social status. Students are young and relatively unencumbered; students as individuals inhabit a transitory identity that they will soon leave, usually without sticky stigma; students in aggregate occupy a dynamic status infused with an energetic new generation each year. These features help to explain why student movements emerge and re-emerge, but they also point to some of the reasons why student movements have so often failed to achieve their social change goals (Taylor and Van Dyke 2007: 277) . In this essay, we seek to understand why and when social movements do succeed in extracting concessions from dominant institutions. We begin by briefly theorizing the notion of disruption as central to social movement success. We then distinguish between two types of disruption that are often practiced by student movements and viewed as similar by sociologists. We argue that the radically different dynamics of these two forms of disruption very often affect the success of student movements in leveraging social change.[i]

Piven (2006) defines disruption as “withdrawing cooperation in social relations,” arguing that the fact or threat of disruption to large institutions (or to society as a whole) is the chief mechanism for coercing concessions from those in command. Working with this vision of how collective action achieves change, we observe that student movements have utilized two distinct forms of disruptive protest: structural disruption within educational institutions, centered around their refusal to perform their role as students; and invasive disruption of other institutions in which they do not have routinized role in their functioning. The difference between the two is exemplified by contrasting two tactics used by many social movements: sit-downs and sit-ins. Sit-down strikes are conducted by workers, who stop performing their appointed tasks and remain idly at their work stations (so they cannot be replaced) unless and until their demands are met. The disruption derives from the dependency of management on the workers to perform their appointed task and the leverage generated therefore emerges from the structure of the organization itself. Sit-ins, on the other hand, are usually conducted by outsiders, who enter an establishment and attempt to disrupt its functioning by interfering with the ongoing activities of those working there. The disruption derives from the invasion of spaces by individuals with no organic role in the organization. While both forms of disruption can successfully interfere with normal functioning and can therefore develop usable leverage, we believe that the fate of student movements often depends on whether they seek to create structural or invasive leverage.

Structural disruption derives from what labor theorists have called positional power (Schwartz 1976; Silver 2003; Perrone, 1984). In large structures, different categories of participants have differing roles and therefore have differing abilities to disrupt operations. In factories, assembly line workers almost immediately disrupt production by stopping work, while office employees slowly erode relationships with customers and suppliers, yielding less disruption, at least in the short term.

A similar contrast can be made in the education system. If university students stop attending class, they disrupt the education function of the university, but they might leave its research function intact; thus they occupy it. If the faculty strike, they disrupt both education and research. If elementary school teachers strike, they disrupt primary education, but also—because their students are not in school—disrupt substantial sectors of the economy because parents remain home to care for their children.

This contrast in positional power underscores the limited structural leverage possessed by students. Because they can only disrupt the educational function by failing to play their role they develop leverage only over the administration of their schools, and therefore must restrict their demands to those “grantable” by the leaders of the educational sector they are disrupting. This is in sharp contrast to elementary school teachers, whose ability to disrupt the wider economy generates leverage over political officials and the captains of the economy, allowing them to utilize their positional power to make broader demands.

If students wish to make demands that cannot be granted by the administration of their educational institutions, they must undertake invasive disruption capable of interfering with the functioning of the broader social system, a much more difficult enterprise. Experienced activists often recognize this limitation on student power; a Chilean student interviewed during the protests during the 2011-12 academic year commented:

School occupations and strikes are the two measures we have as students at our immediate disposition to exercise pressure. What do you have beyond that? Taking the streets massively and destabilizing everyday life; this takes a lot of efforts to sustain… Now in the university, a strike might work, not because politicians are concerned that students aren´t learning, but because you cut the flow of resources into the university and thus you exercise leverage on the administration.

Whereas the Chilean activist was pessimistic about mounting a broader protest to raise broader demands, an Argentine student activist was more optimistic about the prospect of mounting invasive protest outside the university to pressure the government around funds for education:

It always depends on the correlation of forces and your demands…. If you are fighting for educational budget and you occupy the university, no one gives a fuck, but if you combine that with street mobilizations then you begin to gain visibility.

It is apparent from these comments by experienced student activists that effective disruption outside the confines of the university involves a different equation of forces than activism on the campus, including differing tactics and organizational resources; a greater probability of repression; and amplified requirements for allies, especially those with positional power in the targeted structure.

We illustrate this contrast by comparing two antiwar tactics undertaken by U.S. students during the Vietnam War.

• The campaign against Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), which trained about a third of the officers serving in the war, utilized structural disruption on campus to pressure university administrations to discontinue the program. After initial success at Harvard University in 1969, student activists targeted ROTC on hundreds of campuses, significantly reducing the size of the program and contributing to what became a chronic shortage of officers in the U.S. military.

• The campaign against the military draft initially sought to use invasive disruption by entering army bases and disrupting the pre-induction processing of potential draftees. The effort foundered because it was so difficult for protestors to enter the bases where the pre-induction proceedings took place, and the ease with which the relatively few demonstrators who breached the barriers could be arrested.  These failures were reversed when the student activists began organizing the potential draftees themselves to disrupt the proceedings, thus transforming invasive disruption into structural disruption. This tactic substantially contributed to the dramatic decline in draftees reporting for duty during the last years of the war.

The varying fate of student-led Vietnam War protests point to critical distinctions between the dynamics of on-campus and off-campus activism. When attempting to leverage educational administrators, students can rely on their own structural power to force concessions; but against outside targets, students require alliances with other groups to overcome the resistance of these alien structures. The use of invasive disruption, therefore, depends on the creation of bridging organizations to collectivities with positional power in the target institutions.[ii]

References:

Perrone, Luca. 1984. “Positional Power, Strikes and Wages.” American Sociological Review. 49 (3), June, 412-26.

Piven, Frances Fox. 2006. Challenging Authority. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Schwartz, Michael. 1976. Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880-1890. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Silver, Beverley. 2003. Forces of Labor: Workers movement and Globalization since 1870. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, V. and Van Dyke, N. 2007. “Get up, Stand up”: Tactical Repertoires of Social Movements, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements. Wiley-Blackwell.

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[i]  The paper draws on an array of examples that the authors have encountered through experience or research.

[ii] Another illustration of the same alliance-building process occurred during 2011, when Chilean students formed an alliance with copper miners; the two-day strike in august thus threatened to disrupt one of Chile´s most important industries and extracted concessions from the national government. Here again, the alliance required the construction of bridging organizations and the involvement of allies with positional power over the target institution.