Why We Can’t Just “Stick to the Books”: The Campus Contradiction
Let’s be real. College life today is nothing like the movies or our parents’ experience. It’s not just late-night studying and caffeine addictions; it’s a total pressure cooker. We’re constantly dealing with life-altering problems that the university is supposed to help us solve. Though more often than not, it seems that the University only makes them worse. For many of us, our current student activism isn’t a side hustle or a break from studying; it is the most necessary kind of learning we’ll get.
This activism is blowing up right now because of a few core crises that define being a student today:
- The Money Problem: We’re drowning in debt. Tuition continues to climb, making the whole system feel less like a public good and more like a corporate product. We’re paying enormous sums of money for a piece of paper that seem useless compared to connections in the system, funding massive sports complexes while cutting school programs, and, overall, our schools act more like a hedge fund than a venue for educational improvement.
- The Planet’s Burning: The climate crisis isn’t an abstract for us. It’s our future on the line. When we demand that our university divest from fossil fuels, it’s because we see the hypocrisy: How can a place dedicated to knowledge and innovation be funding the industries that are literally destroying the planet?
- Global Politics is Local: The campus is not a neutral zone. We’re living through massive global crises that we see our universities as increasingly and directly entangled in.
This is the central contradiction: We come here to learn how to fix the world, but we often discover our own institutions are part of the problem.
Take the Palestine protests. The demonstrations and encampments aren’t random political arguments; they’re direct, ethical demands for institutional accountability. Students are asking: “If the university is supposed to uphold values of education, justice, and human rights, why are its investments tied up with companies that profit from ignorance, war, and violence?”
When administrations suppress these protests, calling in the police and punishing students, they confirm the students’ most profound suspicion: that the university’s commitment to its investment portfolio outweighs its commitment to education and social justice.
This is where the theory comes in, and it’s actually pretty simple. Paulo Freire’s banking model states that students are treated like empty jars that teachers just fill up with facts. You sit down, shut up, and passively accept the official version of history and knowledge.
But how are we supposed to passively receive knowledge when the facts we’re being taught are contradicted by the news on our phones, or by our university’s own unethical investment decisions? The “banking model” doesn’t work because it doesn’t equip us to address the real, urgent, complex problems we face. It asks us to be silent and compliant when the moment demands we be critical and active.
By protesting, by occupying space, and by organizing our own teach-ins, we are practicing Freire’s antidote: “problem-posing” education. We identify the problem (institutional complicity), analyzing it together outside of the official curriculum, and taking action to transform that reality. We’re transforming the campus from a place of passive consumption into an active classroom for justice. This move from passive student to active change-maker is what truly defines engaged pedagogy. It is also an affirmation of Angela Davis’s observation: “The freedom struggle is not a single act. It is a constant struggle, and it is a constant effort to redefine what freedom means.” This is how students are reclaiming the missions of the university, not through a textbook, but through an organized practice of freedom.
Education as the Practice of Freedom
Bell Hooks envisioned the classroom as “the most radical space of possibility.” She means that learning shouldn’t be about just memorizing facts to ace a test. It should be a transformative process, one where we learn to think critically, challenge power, and work toward collective liberation. If education isn’t teaching us how to be free and actively dismantle oppression, then what’s the point?
Sandy Grande teaches us that when official spaces become closed off, push back and create new spaces of political action. For today’s student activists, they’ve followed just that. The real radical space isn’t found in a textbook-bound classroom; it’s found by those creating chants before the protest, by those organizing a teach-in, on the encampments where people had to redefine and reevaluate relationships and power dynamics, or the encrypted group chat discussing how to balance safety and activism. Engaged pedagogy demands a democratic, shared learning environment, which is why when students organize in all these ways, they are fundamentally challenging hierarchy. The traditional teacher-student roles dissolve: the student who just researched institutional divestment becomes the temporary expert, and the professor who joins the line becomes a co-learner, co-creating the curriculum of resistance where everyone is responsible for contributing knowledge.
Furthermore, this form of learning requires bringing our whole selves into the space, as hooks insisted, recognizing not just our brains, but our emotions, our pain, and our experiences. When students protest institutional racism or demand better mental health resources, they are actively refusing the academic pressure to separate their identity from their intellect, demanding an education that sees their humanity, not just their test scores.
Finally, the most important aspect of this action is the power of transgression. The students become the moral and pedagogical compass by committing the transgression that the institution was too afraid to commit. When forced to stage a massive protest, discuss divestment, or resource allocation, students put shared learning into direct action, showing the university what true critical learning looks like.
Ultimately, the student movements we see today, regardless of the injustices they are fighting, are urgent lessons to the University in what actual engaged pedagogy looks like. Students are demonstrating that proper education is messy, passionate, and deeply political. They are the ones truly practicing the freedom that the university brags endlessly about in its mission statement.
The Intersectional Front: Who is Organizing Today?
Today’s student movements are intensely intersectional. Today’s activists understand that you can’t tackle one crisis without addressing how it’s tangled up with others.
For example, if students protest rising tuition, they’re not just making an economic demand. They know that because of systemic issues, the burden of student loan debt falls disproportionately on Black and Latine students. So, a demand for lower tuition is automatically a demand for racial and economic justice. You can’t separate them. When students demand better institutional responses to gender-based violence or transphobia, they are also protesting the hiring practices, the curriculum, and the administrative culture that perpetuate those dangers. They are saying the university is not just failing to protect them, but actively creating an unsafe environment.
The intersectional focus of student activism directly implements Bell Hooks’s critique of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Students are protesting the institutions that uphold these systems.
When the administration acts against protestors, they often confirm the activist critique. For instance, when institutions use disciplinary action or aggressive policing to shut down demonstrations, who is usually targeted first? Frequently, it is the most marginalized students, students of color, those relying on financial aid, or those lacking institutional privilege. This targeted crackdown proves the activists’ point: the university’s systems of power are designed to protect the status quo and silence those who challenge its core oppressions.
In short, the activists leading today’s movements are proving that an intersectional understanding of power is essential for change. They are rejecting the idea of addressing one problem at a time. They are saying that if the institution is going to be a battleground, they are going to fight for structural change that benefits all those harmed by the stacked systems of oppression.
The Platform is the Pedagogy: Bypassing the Institutional Firewall
When we try to use traditional tactics, like a large daytime rally or a formal petition, administrations have a ready-made defense. They’ve perfected “containment strategies”: They do one of three things:
- They shove the protest into a remote corner of campus and then ignore it. The message is literally confined and isolated.
- They neutralize the protest’s message with a carefully worded press release that goes on about “robust dialogue” and “deep concern” without actually promising any change.
- They wait us out. They know that students have work, families, midterms, and finals; they count on us running out of energy and wait for the news cycle to move on to avoid ever implementing any demanded changes.
Traditional protest is failing “just the way universities designed it to.” We can’t keep using tactics that institutions have spent decades learning to neutralize. We have to adapt.
This is where digital tools, from social media to open-source blogs like HASTAC, become essential. They don’t just help us organize; they help us wage a digital counter-narrative campaign that bypasses the university’s control.
The necessity of digital tools is rooted in the creation of a digital counter-narrative that bypasses the university’s control. This starts with real-time transparency, when the administration issues its carefully worded press release, activists can immediately post real-time video of the police presence or the direct policy being protested. This struggle to reclaim and define the space for knowledge and action is a contemporary version of a much older battle. As Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o argued in Decolonising the Mind, the crucial fight is to refuse the established cultural boundaries and “to break the walls of the prison house of the mind.” Students today are physically and digitally breaking those walls by creating a sovereign public sphere where their concerns are central.
This use of platforms like Signal, Instagram, and TikTok instantly exposes the gap between the university’s stated values and its repressive actions. This then creates “the uncontainable message.” While you can contain a rally in a ‘Free Speech Zone,’ you can’t confine a viral hashtag or a projected message onto the side of a library building. Through these methods, we are putting our academic and activist work into the public sphere, making it too visible to ignore and too widespread to suppress easily.
Finally, this leads to counter-archiving and accountability. This is where HASTAC and other open platforms come in. When an administration takes down a student website or deletes social media posts, we use public platforms to “counter-archive.” We publish research, analysis, and personal accounts that permanently document the protest, the institutional response, and the reasons why we acted. This is a deliberate, scholarly-activist move to hold the institution accountable long after the news cycle is over.
The digital space is a double-edged sword; administrations also use digital repression through surveillance and tracking, but for students today, the immense power to organize, innovate, and instantly challenge the institutional narrative makes digital literacy and public scholarship the most crucial skills for the next generation of activists.
Learning from the Barricade
We’ve seen that today’s student activism is not a distraction from education; it is a profound and necessary act of engaged pedagogy itself. We are stepping outside the “banking model” that failed to prepare us for reality and creating our own curriculum of resistance on the front lines.
The current state of affairs forces us to acknowledge a few things. First, we can be the theorists. By staging intersectional protests against war, climate denial, and institutional debt, we are demonstrating a deeper, more holistic understanding of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” than many formalized university curricula can manage. We are putting Freire’s critical consciousness into practice, not just reading about it. Second, the digital space is the new public square. In the face of repressive administrations that use containment strategies, digital platforms and public scholarship networks like HASTAC are crucial. They allow us to bypass institutional firewalls, control our own narrative, and engage in the vital work of counter-archiving our struggles. This ensures that the lessons learned on the “barricade” are preserved and widely shared.
This isn’t just a fascinating topic to study in a seminar; it’s a direct challenge to everyone. There are people who claim to be committed to social change, and if students are showing you the way, there’s a responsibility to act on your own claims. Bell Hooks challenged us to use our position for transgression, to break the rules and boundaries that maintain institutional injustice. If those in the academy truly believe in changing the way they teach and learn, they must support the pedagogy of action by stopping the view of student activism as disruption. They must start recognizing it as a legitimate, necessary form of learning and knowledge production. They need to defend students when we are disciplined for enacting the very critical theories they teach. Furthermore, they must practice true public scholarship. They need to use their own research and platforms to amplify the arguments of student activists, not just study us from a distance. Their scholarly work is strongest when it is deployed for the public good. They need to join students in challenging the privatization of knowledge by keeping work open, accessible, and activist-oriented.
The campus is the site of contradiction, but it is also the site of radical possibility. Students have already begun building these intersectional landscapes. Now it’s time for everyone to join, participate, and sit in on the lessons.
References
Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement (F. Barat, Ed.). Haymarket Books.
Freire, P. (2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1970)
Grande, S. (2018). Refusing the university. In E. Tuck & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice? Describing diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 47–65). Routledge.
Hooks, B. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
Wa Thiong’o, N. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey; Heinemann.