How the Howard University Protests Hint at the Future of Campus Politics
Students’ weeklong occupation of an administrative building may be a harbinger of tenacious pushback at other colleges.
Students at Howard University occupied the campus’s Johnson Administration Building in protest in 1968. They did so again in 1989. Those occupations lasted four and five days, respectively, and ended with varying degrees of success. Now, current Howard students are in day seven of an occupation of their own. It is the longest takeover of the building in the institution’s history.
The dynamics currently driving campus activism are coming to a head at the illustrious historically black university in the nation’s capital. And Howard's experience, and in particular the unprecedented length of the students’ protest—even though the university may never meet their demands—may be
