Multiculturalism's Genocide: A Brief History of Administrative Repression and Student Resistance

Abstract

It’s easy to forget that even the tamest forms of institutional multiculturalism only exist today due to radical struggles by social movements, and particularly student movements. To be more specific, the university as we find it today is the product of two opposing forces: on the one hand, radical student movements, particularly those struggling against racism, capitalism, patriarchy, settler colonialism, and imperialism; on the other hand, the counterinsurgent strategies forged by the state, corporations, and university administrators, which aimed, and still aim, to neutralize the transformative power of these movements. The continuing struggle between those counterforces continues today. The administrative cooptation of radical movements under the banner of “multiculturalism,” often carried forward via institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, has been a crucial element of this counterinsurgency against radical student movements. But there’s also a more explicitly violent side to the story. For this cooptation would never have been successful if it were not carried out alongside the much more direct forms of coercion—including direct, brutal violence—that have been aimed at students over the past fifty years. This article focuses on this story, as well as the story of the ongoing resistance being carried forward by student movements today.

[i] For a persuasive account of this story, see Roderick A. Ferguson, We Demand: The University and Student Protests (Berkeley: U of California P, 2017).