At the beginning my topic was very broad. I wanted to cover college protest as a whole, but did not realize how much research that actually entailed. I felt as if i was capable of doing so, but found out soon on that it would be almost impossible to write a research paper that covered every college protest with no direction. So i narrowed down my options with the second paper. I compared random college protests from the past to the present ones. I felt fine with this direction, but then at a certain point realized it was not the direction i wanted to go in. With a little more research on the topic i found that i wanted to follow tuition costs and the reaction students had to them. I took a protest that happened at Rutgers university on rising tuition costs and compared it to the most recent ones in California. I compared the way the students went about it and the politics that surrounded the issue. I feel like this will be my final direction because it definitely drives my curiosity and it is a very common issue among college students.
My biggest influence for this paper has been the protests at UC Berkeley in California. There was so much media surrounding it that it would have been wrong not to go along with that topic. This also helped me with learning about the research process. You need to use everything at your disposal to make your point and support your thesis. I have not yet come up with a concrete thesis but, as is the research, it is a working progress. I feel with every draft that i compose, i come closer and closer to a more concrete topic.
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The question I have is whether or not protest ever does much to mitigate, let alone stop, tuition cuts. How bad do the protests have to be to get some attention? And can there be a backlash? I think Friend talks about how the Regan revolution began in the wake of Berkeley protests and left us with Prop 13, which makes it impossible to raise taxes to pay for education... Backlash? Friend suggests as much.
ReplyDeleteYou still need something to add to the discussion on protest. What is the big thing you learned from what you have researched? Did you gain some larger insight into protests at college?