The incident is a sign that, after a lapse of a couple of decades, student activism is about to rise again.
Trends come and go.
Student activism in the 1960s started with participation in the environmental and civil rights movements and segued into the anti-war movement that lasted until the Vietnam War ended early in the subsequent decade. Appropriately enough, Harvard was the scene of early student activism against the war. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to the university for a conference and was confronted and blockaded by students protesting the fact that the war appeared to be escalating. The confrontations across the nation became increasingly strident and violent, such as the massive disruption at Columbia, and culminated in the massacre at Kent State. As the anti-war feeling was subsiding, an outdoor convocation at the University of California at Berkeley had Jacques Cousteau as the chief speaker.