In recent years, college campuses have been rocked by black students protesting racial bigotry, and women’s groups denouncing sexual harassment. But in the age of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump’s class-based politics, we’re beginning to see something new: the rise of low-income and working-class students protesting longstanding inequalities on campus that in the previous decades were mostly ignored.
The new movement took center stage this past weekend as the Harvard College First-Generation Student Union hosted a conference of 350 students and administrators, mostly from Ivy League institutions, that called for boosting the presence of disadvantaged students on elite campuses and reducing their alienation.