Reprint: The University as a Community of Resistance

Editors’ abstract, 2025: In this article, Antony Mullaney argues that universities should join the resistance movement in the United States. He discusses some of the movements of the 1960s and posits that education should serve as a center of dissent and resistance and that universities should oppose existing power relations. Mullaney points out that universities’ attempts to maintain neutrality simply serve to reproduce the interests of those in power. He offers a model for universities that includes supporting students’ and faculty's resistance activities and encouraging legal and public understandings of student dissent as a form of civil disobedience. Elevating the student movements of his time, Mullaney calls on universities to respond to student activism with the recognition that dissent shapes possibilities for the future—by moving beyond fears that sustain centers of power.