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 rates of shantytown protest.