In the spring of 1968, Columbia University erupted. Students occupied buildings, confronted the university's administration, and demanded institutional change in a watershed moment for American activism. As both witness and participant, renowned sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein captured this pivotal uprising with unparalleled clarity and insight.

This essential reissue of University in Turmoil returns Wallerstein's penetrating analysis to a new generation grappling with similar questions of power, purpose, and protest within academic institutions. His firsthand account illuminates not just what happened during those tumultuous weeks, but why those events still matter in our ongoing struggle to reimagine the university as a site of social transformation. This new edition features a thought-provoking and comprehensive introduction by political theorist Jodi Dean that situates this work within Wallerstein's broader intellectual project, from world-systems analysis to his critiques of global capitalism, to demonstrate how the Columbia conflict connects to Wallerstein's groundbreaking theories on structural inequality, institutional power, and social movements. As today's students confront issues from climate justice to racial equity, from economic precarity to geopolitical conflict, Wallerstein's insights resonate with renewed urgency, revealing the university not merely as a backdrop for protest but as a contested terrain where broader societal struggles are enacted and reimagined.

Both historical document and theoretical framework, University in Turmoil offers an indispensable perspective for anyone seeking to understand the complex relationship between academic institutions, student activism, and social change-then and now.

Immanuel Wallerstein was Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at Yale from 2000 until his death in 2019. From 1976 to 1999, he was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY), where he founded and directed the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations. From 1975 until his death he spent part of every year at the Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris. Wallerstein was recognized for his brilliance the world over. His many books and countless articles have been translated into dozens of languages. Of them, his world-renowned four-volume history of The Modern World-System is a masterful examination of the Western world from 1500 to the modern era. He is now and will be for time to come considered by many to be the most influential social scientist of his era.

Katharine Wallerstein, PhD, is an independent scholar and associate researcher at Centre de recherche sur les arts et le langage, EHESS. She is the director of the Paris-based Wallerstein Institute for World Futures.