This post first appeared at TomDispatch.

Allowing the prevailing culture to define the parameters of their protest has left the burgeoning Millennial Movement in a precarious position.

Dur­ing the past aca­d­e­m­ic year, an upsurge of stu­dent activism, a move­ment of mil­len­ni­als, has swept cam­pus­es across the coun­try and attract­ed the atten­tion of the media. From coast to coast, from the Ivy League to state uni­ver­si­ties to small lib­er­al arts col­leges, a wave of stu­dent activism has focused on stop­ping cli­mate change, pro­mot­ing a liv­ing wage, fight­ing mass incar­cer­a­tion prac­tices, sup­port­ing immi­grant rights and of course cam­paign­ing for Bernie Sanders.

Both the media and the schools that have been the tar­gets of some of these protests have seized upon cer­tain aspects of the upsurge for crit­i­cism or praise, while ignor­ing oth­ers. Com­men­ta­tors, pun­dits and reporters have fre­quent­ly triv­i­al­ized and mocked the pas­sion of the stu­dents and the ways in which it has been direct­ed, even as uni­ver­si­ties have tried to appro­pri­ate it by pro­mot­ing what some have called “ neolib­er­al mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism.” Think of this as a way, in par­tic­u­lar, of tam­ing the pow­er of the present demands for racial jus­tice and absorb­ing them into an increas­ing­ly mar­ket-ori­ent­ed sys­tem of high­er education.

In some of their most dra­mat­ic actions, stu­dents of col­or, inspired in part by the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment, have chal­lenged the racial cli­mate at their schools. In the process, they have launched a wave of cam­pus activism, includ­ing sit-ins, hunger strikes, demon­stra­tions and peti­tions, as well as emo­tion­al, in-your-face demands of var­i­ous sorts. One nation­al coali­tion of stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions, the Black Lib­er­a­tion Col­lec­tive, has called for the per­cent­age of black stu­dents and fac­ul­ty on cam­pus to approx­i­mate that of blacks in the soci­ety. It has also called for free tuition for black and Native Amer­i­can stu­dents, and demand­ed that schools divest from pri­vate prison cor­po­ra­tions. Oth­er stu­dent demands for racial jus­tice have includ­ed pro­mot­ing a liv­ing wage for col­lege employ­ees, reduc­ing admin­is­tra­tive salaries, low­er­ing tuitions and fees, increas­ing finan­cial aid and reform­ing the prac­tices of cam­pus police. These are not, how­ev­er, the issues that have gen­er­al­ly attract­ed the atten­tion either of media com­men­ta­tors or the col­leges themselves.

Instead, the spot­light has been on stu­dent demands for cul­tur­al changes at their insti­tu­tions that focus on deep-seat­ed assump­tions about white­ness, sex­u­al­i­ty, and abil­i­ty. At some uni­ver­si­ties, stu­dents have per­son­al­ized these demands, insist­ing on the removal of spe­cif­ic fac­ul­ty mem­bers and admin­is­tra­tors. Empha­siz­ing a pol­i­tics of what they call ​“recog­ni­tion,” they have also demand­ed that sig­nif­i­cant on-cam­pus fig­ures issue pub­lic apolo­gies or acknowl­edge that ​“black lives mat­ter.” Some want uni­ver­si­ties to imple­ment in-class ​“trig­ger warn­ings” when dif­fi­cult mate­r­i­al is being pre­sent­ed and to cre­ate ​“safe spaces” for mar­gin­al­ized stu­dents as a sanc­tu­ary from the dai­ly strug­gle with the main­stream cul­ture. By seiz­ing upon and respond­ing to these (and only these) stu­dent demands, uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors around the coun­try are attempt­ing to domes­ti­cate and appro­pri­ate this new wave of activism.

In the mean­time, right-wing com­men­ta­tors have depict­ed stu­dents as cod­dled, enti­tled, and ene­mies of free speech. The lib­er­tar­i­an right has launched a broad media cri­tique of the cur­rent wave of stu­dent activism. Com­men­ta­tors have been quick to dis­miss stu­dent pro­test­ers as over-sen­si­tive and enti­tled pur­vey­ors of ​“aca­d­e­m­ic vic­ti­mol­o­gy.” They lament the ​“cod­dling of the Amer­i­can mind.” The Atlantic’s Conor Frieder­s­dorf has termed stu­dents ​“mis­guid­ed” in their protests against racist lan­guage, ideas, and assump­tions, their tar­get­ing of ​“microag­gres­sion” (that is, uncon­scious offen­sive com­ments) and insen­si­tiv­i­ty, and their some­times high­ly per­son­al attacks against those they accuse. One of the most vocal crit­ics of the new cam­pus pol­i­tics, the Foun­da­tion for Indi­vid­ual Rights in Edu­ca­tion, argues that such ram­pant ​“lib­er­al­ism” and ​“polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness” vio­late aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom and free­dom of speech. (In this, they are in accord with the lib­er­al Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union. Free speech advo­cates Daphne Patai and the ACLU’s Har­vey Sil­ver­gate, for exam­ple, bemoan a new diver­si­ty require­ment at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts for its ​“politi­ciza­tion of education.”)

In a response that, under the cir­cum­stances, might at first seem sur­pris­ing, col­lege admin­is­tra­tors have been been remark­ably open to some of these stu­dent demands — often the very ones derid­ed by the right. In this way, the com­men­ta­tors and the admin­is­tra­tors have tend­ed to shine a bright light on what is both per­son­al and sym­bol­ic in the new pol­i­tics of the stu­dent pro­test­ers, while ignor­ing or down­play­ing their more struc­tur­al and eco­nom­i­cal­ly chal­leng­ing desires and demands.

The Neolib­er­al University

Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors have been par­tic­u­lar­ly amenable to stu­dent demands that fit with cur­rent trends in high­er edu­ca­tion. Today’s neolib­er­al uni­ver­si­ty is increas­ing­ly fac­ing mar­ket pres­sures like loss of state fund­ing, pri­va­ti­za­tion, ris­ing tuition, and stu­dent debt, while pro­mot­ing a busi­ness mod­el that empha­sizes the man­age­r­i­al con­trol of fac­ul­ty through con­stant ​“assess­ment,” empha­sis on ​“account­abil­i­ty,” and rewards for ​“effi­cien­cy.” Mean­while, in a soci­ety in which labor unions are con­stant­ly being weak­ened, the high­er edu­ca­tion labor force is sim­i­lar­ly being — in the term of the moment — ​“flex­i­bi­lized” through the weak­en­ing of tenure, that once iron­clad guar­an­tee of pro­fes­so­r­i­al life­time employ­ment, and the increased use of tem­po­rary adjunct faculty.

In this con­text, uni­ver­si­ties are scram­bling to accom­mo­date stu­dent activism for racial jus­tice by incor­po­rat­ing the more indi­vid­u­al­ized and per­son­al side of it into increas­ing­ly depoliti­cized cul­tur­al stud­ies pro­grams and busi­ness-friend­ly, mar­ket-ori­ent­ed aca­d­e­m­ic ways of think­ing. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, how today’s stu­dents frame their demands often reflects the envi­ron­ment in which they are being raised and edu­cat­ed. Post­mod­ern the­o­ry, an approach which still reigns in so many lib­er­al arts pro­grams, encour­ages tex­tu­al analy­sis that reveals hid­den assump­tions encod­ed in words; psy­chol­o­gy has pop­u­lar­ized the impor­tance of indi­vid­ual trau­ma; and the neolib­er­al ide­ol­o­gy that has come to per­me­ate so many schools empha­sizes indi­vid­ual behav­ior as the most impor­tant agent for social change. Add togeth­er these three strands of thought, now deeply embed­ded in a col­lege edu­ca­tion, and injus­tice becomes a mat­ter of the wrongs indi­vid­u­als inflict on oth­ers at a deeply per­son­al lev­el. Deem­pha­sized are the poli­cies and struc­tures that are built into how soci­ety (and the uni­ver­si­ty) works.

For this rea­son, while schools have down­played or ignored stu­dent demands for changes in admis­sions, tuition, union rights, pay scales, and man­age­ment pre­rog­a­tives, they have jumped into the heat­ed debate the stu­dent move­ment has launched over ​“microag­gres­sions” — per­va­sive, stereo­typ­i­cal remarks that assume white­ness as a norm and exoti­cize peo­ple of col­or, while tak­ing for grant­ed the white nature of insti­tu­tions of high­er learn­ing. As part of the present wave of protest, stu­dents of col­or have, for instance, high­light­ed their dai­ly expe­ri­ences of casu­al and every­day racism — state­ments or ques­tions like ​“where are you from?” (when the answer is: the same place you’re from) or ​“as a [fill in the blank], how do you feel about…” Stu­dent protests against such com­ments, espe­cial­ly when they are made by pro­fes­sors or school admin­is­tra­tors, and the mind­sets that go with them are pre­cise­ly what the right is apt to dis­miss as polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness run wild and uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tions are embrac­ing as the essence of the present on-cam­pus movement.

At Yale, the Inter­cul­tur­al Affairs Com­mit­tee advised stu­dents to avoid racial­ly offen­sive Hal­loween cos­tumes. When a fac­ul­ty mem­ber and res­i­dent house advis­er cir­cu­lat­ed an email cri­tiquing the pater­nal­ism of such an admin­is­tra­tive man­date, stu­dent protests erupt­ed call­ing for her removal. While Yale declined to remove her from her post as a house advis­er, she stepped down from her teach­ing posi­tion. At Emory, stu­dents protest­ed the ​“pain” they expe­ri­enced at see­ing ​“Trump 2016” graf­fi­ti on cam­pus, and the uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent assured them that he ​“heard [their] mes­sage… about val­ues regard­ing diver­si­ty and respect that clash with Emory’s own.” Admin­is­tra­tors are scram­bling to imple­ment new diver­si­ty ini­tia­tives and on-cam­pus train­ing pro­grams — and hir­ing expen­sive pri­vate con­sult­ing firms to help them do so.

At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri, the pres­i­dent and chan­cel­lor both resigned in the face of stu­dent protests includ­ing a hunger strike and a foot­ball team game boy­cott in the wake of racial inci­dents on cam­pus includ­ing pub­lic racist slurs and sym­bols. So did the dean of stu­dents at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege (CMC), when protest erupt­ed over her ref­er­ence to stu­dents (implic­it­ly of col­or) who ​“don’t fit our CMC mold.”

His­to­ri­an and activist Robin Kel­ley sug­gests that today’s protests, even as they ​“push for mea­sures that would make cam­pus­es more hos­pitable to stu­dents of col­or: greater diver­si­ty, inclu­sion, safe­ty, and afford­abil­i­ty,” oper­ate under a con­tra­dic­to­ry log­ic that is sel­dom artic­u­lat­ed. To what extent, he won­ders, does the stu­dent goal of ​“lean­ing in” and cre­at­ing more spaces for peo­ple of col­or at the top of an unequal and unjust social order clash with the urge of the same pro­test­ers to chal­lenge that unjust social order?

Kel­ley argues that the lan­guage of ​“trau­ma” and men­tal health that has come to dom­i­nate cam­pus­es also works to indi­vid­u­al­ize and depoliti­cize the very idea of racial oppres­sion. The words ​“trau­ma, PTSD, micro-aggres­sion, and trig­gers,” he points out, ​“have vir­tu­al­ly replaced oppres­sion, repres­sion, and sub­ju­ga­tion.” He explains that, ​“while trau­ma can be an entrance into activism, it is not in itself a des­ti­na­tion and may even trick activists into adopt­ing the lan­guage of the neolib­er­al insti­tu­tions they are at pains to reject.” This is why, he adds, for uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors, diver­si­ty and cul­tur­al com­pe­ten­cy ini­tia­tives have become go-to solu­tions that ​“shift race from the pub­lic sphere into the psy­che” and strip the present round of demon­stra­tions of some of their power.

Cul­tur­al Pol­i­tics and Inequality

In recent years, cul­tur­al, or iden­ti­ty, pol­i­tics has cer­tain­ly chal­lenged the ways that Marx­ist and oth­er old and new left orga­ni­za­tions of the past man­aged to ignore, or even help repro­duce, racial and gen­der inequal­i­ties. It has ques­tioned the val­ue of class-only or class-first analy­sis on sub­jects as wide-rang­ing as the Cuban Rev­o­lu­tion — did it suc­cess­ful­ly address racial inequal­i­ty as it redis­trib­uted resources to the poor, or did it repress black iden­ti­ty by priv­i­leg­ing class analy­sis? — and the Bernie Sanders cam­paign — will his social pro­grams aimed at reduc­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty alle­vi­ate racial inequal­i­ty by help­ing the poor, or will his class-based project leave the issue of racial inequal­i­ty in the lurch? In oth­er words, the ques­tion of whether a polit­i­cal project aimed at attack­ing the struc­tures of eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty can also advance racial and gen­der equal­i­ty is cru­cial to today’s cam­pus politics.

Put anoth­er way, the ques­tion is: How polit­i­cal is the per­son­al? Polit­i­cal sci­en­tist Adolph Reed argues that if class is left out, race pol­i­tics on cam­pus becomes ​“the pol­i­tics of the left-wing of neolib­er­al­ism.” As he puts it, race-first pol­i­tics of the sort being pushed today by uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors pro­motes a ​“moral econ­o­my… in which 1% of the pop­u­la­tion con­trolled 90% of the resources could be just, pro­vid­ed that rough­ly 12% of the 1% were black, 12% were Lati­no, 50% were women, and what­ev­er the appro­pri­ate pro­por­tions were LGBT people.”

The stu­dent move­ment that has swept across the nation has chal­lenged col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties on the basics of their way of (quite lit­er­al­ly) doing busi­ness. The ques­tion for these insti­tu­tions now is: Can stu­dent demands large­ly be tamed and embed­ded inside an admin­is­tra­tion-sanc­tioned agen­da that in no way under­mines how schools now oper­ate in the world?

Fem­i­nist the­o­rist Nan­cy Fras­er has shown how fem­i­nist ideas of a pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion were suc­cess­ful­ly ​“recu­per­at­ed by neolib­er­al­ism” — that is, how they were repur­posed as ratio­nales for greater inequal­i­ty. ​“Fem­i­nist ideas that once formed part of a rad­i­cal world­view,” she argues, are now ​“increas­ing­ly expressed in indi­vid­u­al­ist terms.” Fem­i­nist demands for work­place access and equal pay have, for exam­ple, been used to under­mine work­er gains for a ​“fam­i­ly wage,” while a fem­i­nist empha­sis on gen­der equal­i­ty has sim­i­lar­ly been used on cam­pus to divert atten­tion from grow­ing class inequality.

Stu­dent demands for racial jus­tice risk being absorbed into a com­pa­ra­ble frame­work. Uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors have found many ways to use stu­dent demands for racial jus­tice to strength­en their busi­ness mod­el and so the micro-man­age­ment of fac­ul­ty. In one case seized upon by free-speech lib­er­tar­i­ans, the Bran­deis admin­is­tra­tion placed an assis­tant provost in a class­room to mon­i­tor a pro­fes­sor after stu­dents accused him of using the word ​“wet­back” in a Latin Amer­i­can pol­i­tics class. More com­mon­ly, uni­ver­si­ties employ a pletho­ra of con­sult­ing firms and cre­ate new admin­is­tra­tive posi­tions to man­age ​“diver­si­ty” and ​“inclu­sion.” Work­shops and train­ing ses­sions pro­lif­er­ate, as do ​“safe spaces” and ​“trig­ger warn­ings.” Such a vision of ​“diver­si­ty” is then pro­mot­ed as a means to pre­pare stu­dents to com­pete in the ​“glob­al marketplace.”

There are even deep­er ways in which a diver­si­ty agen­da aligns with neolib­er­al pol­i­tics. Lit­er­ary the­o­rist Wal­ter Benn Michaels argues, for exam­ple, that diver­si­ty can give a veneer of social jus­tice to ideas about mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion and mer­i­toc­ra­cy that in real­i­ty pro­mote inequal­i­ty. ​“The rule in neolib­er­al economies is that the dif­fer­ence between the rich and the poor gets wider rather than shrinks — but that no cul­ture should be treat­ed invid­i­ous­ly,” he explains. ​“It’s basi­cal­ly OK if eco­nom­ic dif­fer­ences widen as long as the increas­ing­ly suc­cess­ful elites come to look like the increas­ing­ly unsuc­cess­ful non-elites. So the mod­el of social jus­tice is not that the rich don’t make as much and the poor make more, the mod­el of social jus­tice is that the rich make what­ev­er they make, but an appro­pri­ate per­cent­age of them are minori­ties or women.” Or as Forbes Mag­a­zine put it, ​“Busi­ness­es need to vast­ly increase their abil­i­ty to sense new oppor­tu­ni­ties, devel­op cre­ative solu­tions, and move on them with much greater speed. The only way to accom­plish these changes is through a revamped work­place cul­ture that embraces diver­si­ty so that sens­ing, cre­ativ­i­ty, and speed are all vast­ly improved.”

Clear­ly, uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tors pre­fer stu­dent demands that can be coopt­ed or absorbed into their cur­rent busi­ness mod­el. Allow­ing the pre­vail­ing cul­ture to define the para­me­ters of their protest has left the bur­geon­ing Mil­len­ni­al Move­ment in a pre­car­i­ous posi­tion. The more that stu­dents — with the sup­port of col­lege and uni­ver­si­ty admin­is­tra­tions — accept the indi­vid­u­al­ized cul­tur­al path to social change while for­go­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of any­thing greater than cos­met­ic changes to pre­vail­ing hier­ar­chies, on cam­pus and beyond, the more they face ridicule from those on the right who present them as frag­ile, cod­dled, priv­i­leged whiners.

Still, this young, vibrant move­ment has momen­tum and will con­tin­ue to evolve. In this time of great social and polit­i­cal flux, it’s pos­si­ble that its many con­stituen­cies — fight­ing for racial jus­tice, eco­nom­ic jus­tice, and cli­mate jus­tice — will use their grow­ing clout to build on recent vic­to­ries, no mat­ter how limited.

Keep an eye on col­lege cam­pus­es. The bat­tle for the soul of Amer­i­can high­er edu­ca­tion being fought there today is going to mat­ter for the wider world tomor­row. Whether that future will be defined by a cul­ture of trig­ger warn­ings and safe spaces or by democ­ra­tized edu­ca­tion and rad­i­cal efforts to fight inequal­i­ty may be won or lost in the shad­ow of the Ivory Tow­er. The Mil­len­ni­al Move­ment mat­ters. Our future is in their hands.