The resistance, revisited: The fight for the issues that matter to students in a media age

On 30 May, I attended the commencement speech for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Class of 2025. This was a half-incendiary, half-celebratory event for students, family, friends, and parents.

Celebration was in the air as some of the nation’s brightest young minds prepared to take the first steps into post-college adult life. After a rousing speech from this year’s guest speaker, Hank Green, who many may know from the nostalgic and timeless CrashCourse YouTube series, the Student Body President, Meghma Vemuri, gave a keynote speech on behalf of her cohort.

It started as expected: a moving reflection on the university as a space of boundless creativity, innovation, and learning among brilliant minds. It quickly veered, however, into an incendiary condemnation of MIT’s funding of research for the Israeli military. Those graduating students who had planned this with Vemuri burst out of the crowd, lauding Palestine flags. Many parents in the audience booed, and some walked away.

“The MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide,” Vemuri said at the apex of her speech. The stunt ultimately got her banned from accepting her diploma the following day.

Sitting around a table with my uncle, aunt, and cousin (one of the graduates) a couple of hours later, the conversation turned to the speech. There was a full spectrum of reactions. My aunt said Vemuri lacked respect both for students, who would not get their graduation day back, and for parents, who had come from all over the country to see their child finish their college journey. My cousin said he understood the importance and the opportunity to make change, but thought there was a time and a place. Meanwhile, my uncle commended her and called her actions brave.

The issues that capture students’ attention today are a lot more divisive and invite greater polarisation

These three views and the experience itself speak to the inherent complexities students both in the United States and across the globe currently face when it comes to making their voices heard through protest. They brush up against an uncertain future, where personal benefits will diverge with broader struggles for social equity, environmental responsibility, and high-level diplomacy. What myself and the rest of the guests who were watching their loved ones graduating saw was a distillation of outside turmoil cascading in on the students of today from within their university bubbles.

It is a fight one learns to face head on.

In the United States, a pointed parallel has been drawn between the student protests today and those against the Vietnam War draft in 1968. Both have captured the media attention and become sensationalised.

The difference between the past and the present of protest is the audience that protests now have. Students in the past tried to shape policy and engage lawmakers as tactics in parallel to any media stunts.

In an ‘age of engagement’, where issues can be platformed to greater audiences and awareness can be raised much more rapidly, topics of social justice have gained traction in sudden bursts of flame rather than the slow burns of the past. Students have resurrected the art of protesting as a medium, exacerbated by the age of social media, which surpasses state and national borders and spans oceans in the tussle to preserve the freedom of speech. Sixty years after the ‘long sixties’ created the foundation and blueprint for widespread student protesting in the United States and the United Kingdom, the ability for students to mobilise around civil rights and government policy positions they oppose has improved. But the issues that capture the attention of students today are a lot more divisive and invite greater polarisation, as can be seen in responses to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Students are increasingly harnessing the current ‘attention economy’ to, rightly or wrongly, capitalise on the attention and media circulation

“[The Palestine protests] were quite disruptive, but it is important to voice this and make sure that neither side becomes so polarised,” said Chrys Rialas, a recent Geography and Economics graduate from Queen Mary University, London.

The University of Columbia in the United States has become a ‘ground zero’ for student protests surrounding the conflict, with a stark 108 arrests on day one, eventually leading to a total of 3,100 arrests across 60 different US campuses. Students are increasingly harnessing the current ‘attention economy’ to, rightly or wrongly, capitalise on the attention and media circulation that sensationalised actions during protests among the wider public. The idea of encampments in the most visible areas of campuses is designed to do just this. The encampments at the University of Warwick were prominently displayed on the @warwickforpalestine Instagram account, a social media handle with almost 3,000 followers.

This had enough capital to cancel the Eurovision viewing in the Piazza at the centre of campus in both 2024 and 2025, despite being one of Warwick’s largest signature events that drew in over 2,000 students in 2023. However, not all students see these protests as effective.

Students continue to be knocked back, on a collision course with administrations and institutional interests

There is the argument that student protests highlight symbolism over substance and lack an inherent vision for strategic action. By putting together attention-grabbing stunts that are not always followed up with realistic goals, some students argue that the conversation is being siphoned away from the issues that matter.

“People have a deep desire to go out and campaign about civil rights without an inherent understanding of the issues they are campaigning for,” said John Michael Horvath, a rising senior at the University of Nevada, Reno.

After over a year of protesting, there is still widespread dissonance over the best way to engage with it, and whether it is the right method at all. Students continue to be knocked back on a collision course with administrations and institutional interests that find it easy to tune them out. The question both students and the universities in which they protest ponder, as they listen to the echoes of 60 years of student protests, is: are they solving harms, or harming more than they can solve?