IRVINE, Calif. – If campus activism still brings to mind peace signs, a sea of White faces, and liberal strongholds like Berkeley, meet Jesse Cheng.
Cheng is a third-year Asian-American studies major at the University of California, Irvine, a campus less than five decades old in the middle of Orange County, a place of strip malls and subdivisions that gave birth to the ultraconservative John Birch Society.
Comfortable talking with both administrators and anarchists, Cheng is a presence at protests but avoids getting arrested. He doesn’t want to put his graduation at risk or upset his mother, who worked hard to get him here and worries for his safety because she witnessed what happened to dissidents in her native China.
Cheng is part of a growing movement of minority students rallying around a new cause—fighting a budget crisis that’s undermining access to higher education at a time when students of color have become a stronger demographic force.
“For a lot of students of color, this is our dream and our hope—to get to college,” said Cheng, who is about to start a one-year term representing students from all 10 University of California campuses on the system’s board of regents. “We never thought we’d make it, and we’re here. And we’re not going to give it up so easily.”
While talk about a rebirth of student activism surfaces every few years whenever sweatshop labor or some other cause draws a decent crowd, some observers believe that organizing around threats to higher education has the potential to grow into something big, maybe even a national movement.
But a visit to a developing activist hotspot like UC-Irvine—where tensions have run high this year over everything from student tuition hikes to gender-neutral bathrooms and Middle East politics—illustrates the challenges involved.
