ABSTRACT
Student movements in the United States are largelya phenomenon of the last three quarters of the twentieth century. Student protests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focused on institutional problems, such as inept or oppressive administration and poor service. In the first recorded university protest, Harvard students in 1766 rebelled over the quality of butter in the Commons. Later, college students organized demonstrations against in loco parentis, the notion that university officials were to act as parents of their students. Campus protest also took class forms, as students battled town residents over housing, pubs, and other cultural institutions. The lone exception to this apolitical student orientation was the formation of antislavery groups on some Northern campuses in the 1830s. Students also participated in major and minor political party activity, but these pursuits never constituted social movements. Only in the twentieth century, when universities and colleges became more influential civic institutions and the number of students reached a critical mass, did students engage in sustained politically oriented collective protest action aimed at changing government and university policy.
