VISITING some American universities these days feels like touring the scene of an earthquake, or a small war. Though administrators insist the protests that dominoed across campuses in the past year were therapeutic, grievances seethe. Fears for jobs, and of harm—both reputational and physical—endure. “The campus is traumatised,” says Reuben Faloughi, one of the leaders of the protests which, last November, forced the University of Missouri’s president to resign.
As Mr Faloughi knows, some external observers “just think the kids got upset and had a fit”: that these disturbances conform to the old quip about academic quarrels being so vicious because the stakes are so low. That view is mistaken, and not only because of the impact on the participants. As Eshe Sherley, an activist at Yale, says, “Things that happen in the university don’t just stay there.” Rather, the people and ideas they produce ripple across the country. And just as the energy and issues involved are bound to spread beyond campus, they did not originate there either.