ABSTRACT
In Dynamics of Contention, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly define contentious politics as “Episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.” Surely, faculty protest falls far short of being a social movement or a revolution. A central question for students of contentious politics is how and why a formerly quiescent population becomes active and establishes the organizational structures that permit collective action. In the course of mobilization, new actors form and people take on identities they did not have before. Saint Louis University administration made almost no effort to communicate directly with the Faculty Council or its ad hoc committees, despite the Council’s increasing tendency to pass resolutions criticizing the administration.
