Trends in U.S. and Canadian Higher Education Protest and University and Police Responses, 2012-2018: The 2012 Quebec Student Strike


Kristen Bass, University of Toronto

This paper describes the protest movements that roiled university and college campuses in the U.S. and Canada in the 2010s and key strategies used by university administrations and police to manage them. The analysis draws on an innovative new dataset, the Higher Ed Protest Dataset , which combines machine learning and sociological hand-coding. We identify more than 5,600 distinct higher education protest events involving 605 universities and colleges in the United States and Canada between 2012 and 2018, based on analysis of more than 16,000 campus newspaper articles. The paper outlines trends in these protests and in protest management and details these dynamics in three major protest waves: (1) a large-scale strike campaign opposing tuition increases in Québec in 2012, met with extreme policing tactics; (2) Black student-led organizing against racism at University of Missouri, Columbia in 2015, which prompted resignations of top administrators and inspired a wave of solidarity protests across the U.S.; and (3) mass demonstrations against former U.S. President Donald Trump in the fall of 2016 and early 2017. The overarching goals of this paper are twofold: to characterize major patterns in recent episodic contention in higher education and to center universities as important geographic sites, incubators, targets, and institutional managers of campus activism. Our findings contribute to the critical sociological study of social movements at the intersection of higher education, organizations, and policing. This conference presentation will focus on the Canadian story within these protest trends—the 2012 Québec student strike—and the contribution that this empirical case makes to the study of protest events and protest management. As a higher education protest, the Québec 2012 student strike is empirically and theoretically important in three key respects. First, the Québec student strike was organized at a remarkable scale, for months on end. Much of the activity centered in Montréal, but students went on strike and protested in Québec City and other cities and towns throughout the province. Second, the strike had a distinctive focus on class politics and opposition to neoliberal capitalism. As the strike continued, it arguably evolved beyond student-centric issues into a more general social democratic and anti-capitalist movement. A third distinguishing feature of the strike was the extreme violence of the police response and, more generally, the state’s heavy-handed attempt at repressing protest. The Québec student strike highlights several important contributions made by the Higher Ed Protest Dataset for the study of social movements more broadly. Multiple newspapers and newspaper reports provide insight into campaign coordination across institutions, empirically demonstrating how protests are situated in a multi-institutional field. Relatedly, the relationship data allows us to more closely trace the interplay between different groups involved in organizing and campaign development, which goes under-appreciated in most protest event analysis scholarship. Lastly, our data on police allows us to understand the state’s heavy-handed direct responses to coordinated action both on and off-campus, adding to scholarship on protest policing.

Non-presenting authors: Ellen Berrey, University of Toronto; Nathan Kim, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); Alex Hanna      Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

This paper will be presented at the following session: