Moreover, old people are unlikely to support revolutionary changes because revolution always causes some sort of turmoil, and you can likely only begin to reap the benefits of the new order after a long time, e.g. 10-15 years. You're less likely to support such a change if you're going to be dead by the point when its benefits start becoming apparent, or when a significant amount of your remaining time will be spent in the turmoil before that.
Do you think the protests are broadly representative of attitudes at universities? Because sure, I bet that there are more than just the protesters. But colleges have pretty big populations, so the supporters of 40 protesters can still be a couple hundred people out of tens of thousands.
My point is that it is not some irrelevant fringe. I've backed that up with other examples, but I can't show it to you more convincingly.
At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster made is entirely wrong).
But that's just my point with the scare quotes. How does a single person go about gaining experience with the thousands of individuals that comprise a given university?
And then there's ~10 million undergraduate students in the USA. Extrapolating from a few thousand people that choose to speak loudly isn't going to paint a meaningful picture of their views.
Protesters represent one tail of the distribution on some measure (e.g. "belief in social justice"). The fact that protests get more intense and/or more frequent and/or more populous are indications of a shift in the distribution (picture a normal distribution being shifted along the x axis).
That's what I am pointing to. I don't think everyone has to be in lockstep to be able to talk about what a given group does or believes or what not.
It's not even particularly clear to me that protests have gotten more frequent. When I was in school 15 years ago there were enough protests; I just ignored them...
You'll notice however that is a far cry from a representative summary of my point.
Anyway, there are people who've researched this, notably Jonathan Haidt. They created a website to talk about the problem here: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ . And they think that there is a problem of shrinking viewpoint diversity in the social sciences. My experience is that it's gotten worse, but we don't seem to be able to agree on that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/13/the-f...
Are you really saying that anyone saying "there's something going on" is dog whistling?
Man, that's Zionist-conspiracy level crazy.
Personally I have no idea what the typical atmosphere is on university campuses. Of course I'm aware of the protests that make the main stream media, but it seems silly to just assume that those small numbers of protests are broadly representative.