“We Demand does much more than chronicle how student protests tried to remake the university and its intellectual agendas to reflect the diverse, divergent, dissenting bodies that make up the world—it delivers an incisive and sobering account of reaction, of academic complicity in restoring the status quo and its exclusionary, anti-intellectual structures. Roderick Ferguson’s writing on the university is always on time, always urgent, and always aware that the struggle over knowledge is inseparable from the fight for our lives.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“Roderick Ferguson’s We Demand is an enormously valuable text. It introduces students to the political history of the universities they inhabit, and it defamiliarizes features of those institutions that they might take for granted. And Ferguson provides a provocative intervention in critical university studies by centering student movements and especially those of students of color in the story. Ferguson frames the recent history of universities as a site of struggle in which universities have transformed themselves in response to student protest. He thus offers inspiration that we all need in this moment of renewed struggle for democratic and inclusive universities that make and share knowledge in the interest of social justice.”—Miranda Joseph, author of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism