The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest

A recent trend in the literature on social movements is the focus on how social movement organizations influence not only their challengers but also other social movement organizations, both in other movements and movements in diffrent countries. This article shows how diffusion theory helps us to better understand this process by specifing ways in which social movement organizations within the same movement may influence one another through indirect network ties. More specifically, I show that a new tactic of protest, the shantytown, spread rapidly among U.S. campuses between 1985 and 1990. Recent advances in the modeling of diffusion in an event historyframework allow me to testfor the diffsion of this innovative strategy of protest among certain groupings of colleges and universities. Specifically, my results indicate that the tactic spread among colleges and universities with similar size endowments, of roughly the same level of prestige, and of the same institutional type. My analysis also indicates that high prestige, liberal arts colleges with smaller numbers of Afican American students had higher ates of shantytown protest. From the early 1960s to the early 1990s, the issue of the immorality of the South African system of apartheid was a concern on college and university campuses throughout the U.S. Certainly the level of this concern had fluctuated in past decades, as indicated by the cyclical nature of the level of student anti-apartheid activism. Although the origins of the antiapartheid movement on campuses dates back to the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the subsequent U.N. African Asian block boycott against South Africa, the movement was not especially successful until the mid-1980s Uackson 1992; Loeb 1994; Vellela 1988). At this time, activists all over the country began protesting, demonstrating, signing petitions, building blockades and staging sit-ins in a concerted effort to encourage U.S. pension funds, insurance companies, and corporations to withhold their South Africa-related securities. Colleges and universities soon became the target *1 would like to thank Ron Breiger, Elisabeth Clemens, Doug Imig, Doug McAdam, Susan Olzak, David Strang, Sid Tarrow, Pam Tolbert, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this work. Please direct all correspondence to Sarah A. Soule, Department of Sociology, The University of Arizona, 437a Social Sciences Building, Tucson, AZ 85721. Email: [email protected]. i) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1997, 75(3):855-883 856 / Social Forces 75:3, March 1997 of this student movement, as student activists urged them to divest of South Africa-related securities.1 It is not particularly surprising that students participated in the antiapartheid movement. The humanitarian goals of the movement attracted widespread support. Nor is it especially startling that students targeted their own universities in their divestment demands given that colleges were indeed holding securities associated with South Africa. What is interesting about this student movement, however, is the emergence and diffusion of a new protest tactic: the shantytown. Not only did students employ the well-established repertoire of student protest (sit-ins, petitions, demonstrations, rallies, blockades), but they also developed a new protest tactic that spread rapidly to campuses all over the country. Campus activists in many locales adopted this tactic because of both its perceived effectiveness at encouraging colleges and universities to divest and its resonance with the living conditions of many black South Africans (Vellela 1988; Weiner 1986). One student leader remarked: For the campus divestment movement, 1985-86 was the year of the shanties, makeshift structures disrupting the campus landscape of tidy quadrangles and plazas, symbolizing the viciousness of apartheid and the oppression of South Africa's blacks. [The shantytowns] have appeared not only at schools with long radical traditions, like the University of Wisconsin, Reed College, and Columbia University, but also in unexpected places like the University of Utah, the University of Florida at Gainsville and Purdue University (Weiner 1986:1). Experimentation with new protest tactics or the revitalization of tactics used in an earlier period is not peculiar to the student divestment movement. In fact, this tendency has been noted in numerous scholarly works (McAdam 1983; Snow & Benford 1992; Soule & Tarrow 1991; Tarrow 1989, 1994; Tilly 1978, 1993; Zolberg 1972). However, the imitation and diffusion of innovative protest tactics has received less scholarly attention due to the tendency for scholars to treat social movement organizations as discrete entities, ignoring the connections or linkages between them (McAdam & Rucht 1993; Meyer & Whittier 1994). Recently a number of scholars have challenged the notion that social movement organizations are bounded entities and have noted that challenging groups not only influence their direct target, but also influence other social movement organizations both in other movements and in other countries (McAdam & Rucht 1993; Meyer & Whittier 1994; Soule 1995; Soule & Tarrow 1991; Tarrow 1993). This article extends this line of research to within-movement diffusion in the US. Drawing on the theoretical and analytical treatment of diffusion, I use data on the student divestment movement between 1985 and 1990 to shed new light on how indirect channels of diffusion serve as a mechanism for diffusion of protest tactics within this U.S. social movement. The event history models employed in this article allow for the examination of two separate sets of questions, the first about student activism in The Shantytown Protest / 857 general and the second about the diffusion of the shantytown. I first test hypotheses about the characteristics of colleges and universities that increase the rate of student divestment activism. My findings suggest that higher-ranked, liberal arts campuses with smaller enrollments of African American students had higher rates of shantytown protests. These findings are consistent with past research on student movements. Second, I test models about the process of diffusion of this innovative protest tactic. My results indicate that the shantytown diffused most rapidly between colleges and universities of the same institutional type, with similar levels of prestige, and with similar endowment sizes.