The big picture
@1Sherrils_2MIZZ · X (Twitter); @FordHall2015 · X (Twitter); Unknown; The Clarion-Ledger · Democracy Now!; Milan Ilnyckyj · CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 · Flickr — We Are U of T pool
School
City
United States
Canada
A decade of mass protest
↑ TopThe 2010s was a decade of mass protest. After the global financial crisis in 2008, social movements fighting autocracy, capitalism, and racism developed worldwide. This included the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Movement for Black Lives, to name a few.
Organizers mobilized on universities and college campuses in a major way, too. These universities and colleges were the schools that student protesters attended, the employers of protesting faculty and staff, the locus of social movement issues, and the targets of protesters’ demands. This included protests against racist campus climate, for labor, and against politicians.
Protests in the U.S. and in Canada
↑ TopWe found at least 5,572 U.S. and Canadian higher education protests took place between 2012 and 2018, across at least 543 different universities and colleges. Approximately 81 percent of these protests were in the United States and about 18.5 percent in Canada. We gathered this dataset by scraping hundreds of student newspapers. You can learn more about that over in our Design and Methods page.
Protest timing
↑ TopProtests are distributed in an interesting M-shape. Protests would trend upwards during the semester and dip during the summer and winter breaks. That makes sense, since students will typically only take actions when school is in session.
Where protests cluster
↑ TopProtests are concentrated in major urban centers (like New York and Toronto) but also on campuses and in cities with deep protest histories and strong student organizations (like UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and Montréal).
The top issues
↑ TopIn this time period, antiracism was the major issue that U.S. activists led protests on, followed by protests against university administrations, and for labor rights. In Canada, protesters were mostly against administrations, for more just tuition and aid, and for labor rights.
Protest waves in the U.S.
↑ TopThis matched three major waves of protest in the U.S.: protests against racist police brutality after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, solidarity and coordinated protests with the student antiracism campaign at University of Missouri-Columbia (or Mizzou), and protests against Donald Trump’s first presidential election, including protests calling for “sanctuary campuses.”
Protest waves in Canada
↑ TopIn Canada, two waves stood out: a massive student strike against tuition increases in Québec in 2012 and a labor strike for the rights of teaching assistants and other graduate employees in Toronto in 2015.