Universities have been centers of protest for a long time, and extracurricular stuff has always been a major component of what attracts students. I don’t really see much connection between this and the closing of the maths department at the University of Leicester. Students these days are very career focused, and research is funded based on “impact”. These are the driving forces. The image of the student who cares more about radical politics than learning anything or finding a job is from the 1960s, not the 2020s.
I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.
