American Universities and the Political Engineering of Higher Education: A Historical Study of Student Protests (1960–1970) and Their Outcomes

Abstract

One of the significant events in the contemporary history of the United States of America is the student protest movement that encompassed most American universities in the 1960s as a reaction to a range of social and political issues within and outside the United States. Students in several American Universities took upon themselves the responsibility of demanding social and political changes after being influenced by the new cultural ideas that spread during that historical era. These protests are usually studied within the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the left-wing tide opposing the Vietnam War. However, the aspect that is rarely mentioned in the sources concerned with that era (especially Arabic ones) is the consequences of this movement in the field of higher education, particularly the policies and procedures of the United States of America in engineering higher education and university life politically, economically, culturally, and in shaping a university space that is controlled and directed in accordance with state policies and its supreme strategy. This research aims to shed light on the educational policy of the United States of America that followed those protests. The research is divided into an introduction and a historical background to the reasons for the student protest movement and the organizations that emerged from it in various American universities. The second section deals with the changes that occurred in the policies of the United States in the field of higher education as a result of those protests, focusing on the economic and architectural dimensions (related to campus engineering), leading to the changes that occurred regarding funding opportunities and loans obtained by students, and the funding of academic programs that serve the strategic goals of the United States, such as the American Space Exploration Research Program (Star Wars), which aimed among other things, to divert students' ambitions and interests in real change in their lives.