Pity the commencement speakers charged with capping this academic year. After two semesters of vigorous protest on campuses all over the nation, how can the usual chase-your-dreams exhortations suffice? At the University of Missouri, a graduate student’s hunger strike prompted the football team to announce a walkout, compelling in turn the resignations of the university president and chancellor. At Claremont McKenna College in California, protesters drove out the dean of students. Under pressure, Harvard and Yale did away with the title “master.” And at more than 50 schools in all, student protesters made demands to right what they see as historic wrongs—demands for greater faculty diversity, new courses, public apologies, administrators’ ousting. The spring semester brought no end to the upheaval; after winter break, students occupied administrative offices at Duke and Providence College as well.

It’s been a half century since we’ve seen U.S. colleges so roiled. The latest results from a long-running annual UCLA study, published in February, quantified the phenomenon: The share of students who said there was a “very good chance” they would participate in a protest while enrolled rose to 8.5 percent nationwide from 5.6 percent in 2014. (Among black students, the share climbed from 10.5 percent to a full 16 percent.) These figures were the highest the survey had recorded since it began in 1967—encompassing the eras of the military draft, the Kent State shootings, the anti-apartheid movement and the protests against the war in Iraq.

Yet for all its force, ubiquity and urgency—and for all the significance it could have in the coming years and decades—the year’s groundswell has managed only to baffle the broader public. To the cynic, each demonstration was only the latest spasm of a generation given to immature angst. Adding to the confusion, this year’s campus protest, and the movement that has supported it, has no Bob Dylan as its bard, it has no Ramparts as its house organ. And, perhaps more crucially, no Vietnam War dividing the nation. The civil rights movement thriving now, Black Lives Matter, has galvanized supporters nationwide but has focused primarily on police homicides, which is to say that it does not immediately present itself as an issue in college life.

What, then, do the protesters want?