Structuring her work like an academic essay, student director Laura Dunn chronicles two years of workers’ strikes at Yale, one of the wealthiest universities in the fourth poorest city in the country. A junior at the university when the conflict began, Dunn interviews workers, administrators, students, and professors in an effort to make sense of the dissonance on campus, which culminates in a protest at commencement. Examining the responsibilities of a university to its workers, to the surrounding community, and to the education of its students, Dunn engages in a lively and personal dialogue that suggests more questions than answers.

Kyle Henry didn’t need to look far for a subject for his master’s thesis project at the University of Texas–Austin: at the end of the 1998 term, the university closed its Union Film Program, a long-standing repertory screening series on campus, sparking controversy and student protests dubbed the Texas Union Massacre. Exploring the increasingly corporate and consumer-driven politics of the university, Henry engages in serious contemplation of the state of contemporary higher education, which he punctuates with occasional Michael Moore-ish antics (as in the scene in which the all-too-patient student director attempts to schedule a meeting with the Dean of Students). Rarely has the world of film exhibition been the focus of such passionate activism