This resurgence in campus activism necessarily a new phenomenon. After all, The New York Times wrote about “The New Student Activism” back in 2012, attributing the trend to the Occupy Movement. But observers say the activism that’s since proliferated has a different feel, and this new chapter could trigger significant shifts in the way things are run.

American Student Activism, Fall 2014

At least 160 student protests took place in the U.S. over the course of the 2014 fall semester alone, according Angus Johnston, a history professor at the City University of New York who specializes in student activism. “There’s certainly something of a movement moment happening right now,” he said, pointing in part to the news media, which fuels activism by putting protests on the public’s radar. “The campus environment right now has, for the past couple of years, reminded me a lot of the early- to mid-60s moment, where there was a lot of stuff happening, a lot of energy—but also a tremendous amount of disillusionment and frustration with the way that things were going in the country as a whole and on the campuses themselves.” And this sentiment has been taking hold in other parts of the world, too: Thousands of students (and teachers) have been demonstrating in Chile this month in the name of education reform, including two students who were killed last week.

For younger generations, Johnston added, the “belief that you can change the world [hasn’t been] beaten out of you yet.”

Johnston runs a blog-ish website featuring a resource that’s oddly hard to find on the Internet today: a modern timeline of student protests, including color-coded maps illustrating the location and theme of these demonstrations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the map (which has yet to be updated with data from the spring semester) reveals that most of the recent student uprisings during the fall of 2014 focused on racism and police violence, all but a few of them in the eastern half of the country. Many of these demonstrations used hashtags to mobilize, some of which are still in use today. Meanwhile, according to Johnston’s analysis, about half of the 160 protests were evenly split between two main themes: sexism/sexual assault and university governance/student rights. The remainder called for improvements to tuition and funding—about half of them at University of California schools.

But they don’t always have to do with issues specific to students. Just take the divestment campaigns, which are becoming a popular form of political activism at college campuses across the country, including Harvard, Boston University, and Princeton. These efforts are aimed at convincing university administrations to drop their investments in controversial industries (such as guns or fossil fuels) or corporations (such as those that side with Israel) and have little to do with on-campus issues.