the microcosm of campus protests
how university campuses reflect larger societal anxieties
The first college protest I witnessed was Occupy Yale—an offshoot of the broader Occupy Wall Street movement which occurred in late 2011. At the time, I was in my junior year, a pivotal period for summer internship recruiting. Many of the highest-paying opportunities for college grads—consulting and finance, really—recruited juniors for summer internships which then likely turned into return offers for after graduation. If you could figure out where you would work that summer, you could ostensibly figure out the rest of your life.
Despite the serious motivations behind Occupy Wall Street—wealth inequality; disillusionment after witnessing Congress use taxpayer dollars to purchase toxic assets from financial institutions in the 2008 bank bailout; frustration with the corporatization of politics—many students at Yale, including me (then in my libertarian days, oh lord), viewed the movement as somewhat silly.1 Pitch tents in a public space? Camp there for multiple days? What does that accomplish? One student—photographed heading into a J.P. Morgan or Deutsche Bank or Barclays information session with protestors holding an Occupy Wall Street banner in the background—even featured the photo proudly as his Facebook profile picture.