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Against Student Activism Abstract Activism emerging from transient groups is naturally unsustainable. Activism emerging from privileged social groups is not plausible as a model for disempowered groups, and is incapable of serving as a forerunner of democratic public life. If the student activist community can accept and cope with these criticisms, it can redirect itself to useful activity. Introduction In 1991, the town of Bloomington, Indiana had an unusual three-way race for the mayor's office. The "third candidate," a political outsider by definition, was none other than former City Chemist Ron Smith, who had just resigned his office in disgust at the way certain toxic wastes (PCBs) were being dealt with. As mayor, he might have been able to take a firm hand with the matter. He lost. But even had he won, grass-roots activism in Bloomington would still have lost, and this is why; the Ron Smith Campaign addressed itself mainly to the student population and not to the community at large. When school is in session, students make up perhaps half the town's population, and activists of whatever sort can never resist the temptation to see this demographic anomaly as a huge source of potential support. "If only we could get the students involved" is a common activist daydream. Add the fact that many such dreamers arrived in town themselves via the University, and the scenario is complete. The activist community is left staring at its own navel, isolated as usual. Transience Smith did bring in a large number of votes from student districts. But his term would only have been four years, and by that time many of those voters would simply have left town. Regardless of what the legitimacy of any political process may be, the point is that the political work spent on that sector of the population was effectively wasted. It moved away. It would have to be duplicated year after year to maintain any effect, and that's expensive in terms not just of money, but of time. This is the most obvious fault in relying on a transient population for support; the organizational overhead is just too high over the long haul. Activists would be better off doing political work with town residents, even if it's one tenth as effective as the same thing done with students. A miniscule but lasting result can be expanded from year to year, but the more dramatic result with the students soon evaporates. The attention given to the students reinforces top-down tendencies because their potential support for any immediate project is taken more seriously than the longer-term stability of work done with the local community. The Ron Smith Campaign was fundamentally a strategy of decapitation; instead of promoting action at lower echelons of society, or trying to build community among various disempowered groups, the idea was to replace the top of the power pyramid and work down from there. Plots like this lead unavoidably to a loss of ideals as the activists find themselves forced to reproduce the strategies of their opponents. Such strategizing degenerates into efforts to 1) attain some position of authority outright, or 2) produce a mandate for the present authorities. Options not predicated on centralized authority are dumped at the wayside. Instead of trying to bring a process down to participants, the activists end up trying to get people to participate in someone else's process. Activism becomes an exercise in identifying supportive sectors of a population and directing them in the service of the activists' goal. Any vision of a world where people can make collective decisions democratically, without worrying about bands of insiders trying to capture their loyalty, is lost. Transience of student activists themselves is also a problem. Experienced and continuous organizations just do not get built up. People tend to avoid investing themselves in a community they know they will leave. Another natural split between campus and community activists is that students are not compelled by necessity to consider possible long-term negative impacts of what they do. So students commonly assume tasks that extend beyond the immediate locale. But when that happens, hierarchical organization rapidly appears. SEAC (the Student Environmental Action Coalition) is an example of this. For all SEAC's representation of itself as a Coalition, it appears not even to know the meaning of the word. Coalition refers to a grouping together of independent elements; but in practice SEAC is a single national organization headquartered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Local elements pay for the privilege of membership and function largely as executors of the national policy; taking on issues like NAFTA, national wetlands policy, deforestation, and Earth Day planning. Several Bloomington activists hoped that the 1993 SEAC national leadership conference in Indiana would be an opportunity for discussion of grass-roots projects that could be modeled, evaluated in practice, and then widely reproduced. But it was soon made clear that SEAC's national leader, Adam Berry, was more interested in talking up ways to get SEAC on the cover of Time magazine. Once again, a decapitation move: Berry cannot be happy with results that are tangible mainly at the local level. He has to see his organization represented in a highly visible medium. To him, that's evidence of success. The environmental concerns of a given community are interesting to the extent they can be used to make hay for national maneuvering. That's what happens when activists try to maintain continuity of purpose by working on national or issue-based projects rather than those emerging from local needs. Their natural disconnectedness from communities only gets worse. Privilege Society as we now know it expects individuals to act in ways which reinforce existing imbalances of property and power. For the majority, that means being a good employee; one is expected to do work that contributes to the flow of profits. College is a special set of conditions that prepares people for such work both by indoctrination and by improving their productive and facilitative skills. But not everyone can live under the special conditions. In fact, most people don't. College students occupy a position of privilege, not just with respect to people from other social backgrounds with lower income prospects but, during the period spent in school, even with respect to others from their own background. Students enjoy much more free time than other citizens with job or family responsibilities, and typically have access to financial and information resources not found in other walks of life. They can invest resources in forms of activism that the average person cannot, creating a have/have-not situation; some people have the luxury of trying to affect their surroundings in certain ways, other don't. This is plainly undemocratic and again reinforces tendencies to seek solutions from the top down, since the number of people empowered to participate is naturally limited. It's bad enough when people act this way without thinking. When those out to produce change start actively picturing themselves as a "vanguard," or advanced element of society, their commitment to democracy rapidly degenerates. Student activists ordinarily have low comfort levels for working with indigenous disempowered groups. They find it easier to talk to each other than to town residents. There are exceptions of course; but the rule is that student activists prefer the company of the social groups most familiar to them, and exert themselves to address problems in terms of those privileged groups; once again through attempting to influence decisions made by others instead of working towards a more just distribution of power and access in the decision-making process of a community. It's easier to find a student activist working for increased government housing assistance than toward autonomous collective action, such as a revolving-credit fund or sweat-equity program, to facilitate people's possessing their own homes. The latter would require them to interface closely with low-income groups, and that's something they're never very eager to do. Student service organizations, like fraternities and sororities, are susceptible to similar critiques even though their work is usually understood to be "philanthropic" rather than "activist." These organizations self-consciously promote an ethic of service to communities. To their credit, the greeks often address their activities directly to lower-income groups. But the interactions themselves are highly questionable. The philanthropist understands poor people as being in need of aid, not power. Service groups thus provide direct donations of time or money in ways that may meet immediate needs, but which do not seek to improve peoples' ability to fulfill needs without intervention. Implicitly, some groups are always romanticized in a role as victims, others as helpers. The service ethic is insidious; it has no program for making itself obsolete. It's usually presented as a positive influence or socializing force on the greeks themselves. Service groups are not capable of taking a proactive and change-minded view of the problems they feel so good about throwing money at. They not only suffer from the same privileged perspective as their activist cousins, their works are actually formulated in ways that tend to preserve cycles of dependency and disempowerment. The view of poor people as helpless is disturbingly widespread. Even students who come from lower-income backgrounds themselves often strategize their goals in terms of making a claim on the authority of the state and the propertied classes. This is a consequence both of their status as new arrivals in the circles of privilege, and of the hard lesson of their experience that basic resources are controlled from above. Coping and Changing The student life only lasts a few years. Eventually, people settle somewhere after leaving school, and become part of a community. They may decide just to forget about all this world-saving stuff. Or they may feel compelled to work for changes they identify as positive. But the past will still be with them. They are likely to reproduce whatever forms of activism they knew back in school. If those forms are characterized by top-down approaches that maintain distinctions between social classes, then so much the worse for the activists. Those who invest themselves in the status quo might just fall with it. Before it can make itself useful, the student community will have to actually contemplate the navel that it's always staring at. The two universal characteristics of a student population, transience and privilege, will not change. But they could be turned into assets. Sometimes, the emigration of experienced activists to other communities is presented to balance the fact that the migration acts as a brain drain on the college town itself. It does; but that point stops short of its logical consequence. Students of biology or economics are given appropriate training on the expectation that they will eventually leave town and do work in biology or economics. Why is similar training (ie some curriculum of experience) unavailable for activists? As it happens now, their experience is fragmentary because of the opportunistic methods they use. Since a college town ultimately winds up exporting a stream of activists, it should be producing good ones. Activists should leave college with strong operational skills and a strong commitment to combat both the domination of society by authority and the division of society into classes. Skills for organizing and presenting information should proactively be made available to all who participate in student activism. New activists should not just be put onto a phone tree, they should actually be shown how to set up the various kinds. Cultivating the skills and character to act both autonomously and in non-hierarchical groups is important too. Hierarchical activist groups cannot serve as models for a liberated society. This is an unhealthy paradox that corrodes people's ideals. Groups which seek to serve as survivable models for a democratic society must organize themselves in non-hierarchical ways. People are not born knowing the basics of consensus decision-making, or with the wisdom to know when to use consensus and when to use some other process. It doesn't come easy. It has to be learned. Once activists hit the pavement in the real world, they will seek security in their formative experiences. Student activist organizations must make it a firm point to invest in providing those experiences. They must help people to be students of effective activism. This should not be just an option. It should be part of the reason that a college activist group exists. Real grass-roots activist groups often cannot take time out just to train themselves. They learn by doing, by pure trial and error. College activists should take their privilege for all it's worth. They should take the opportunity to improve their capacities to act before they get into a real-world situation with no time for anything but action. Students should also get practical experience with these skills and principles they're learning. They can develop a grass-roots ethic by learning to identify and create options within their sphere of influence, by critiquing and improving local conditions. Cooperation between student activists and local community activists will always be sticky. It can be a good opportunity for students to see what life might be like outside the walls of the university, but it can also be like coming to dinner uninvited. The first step in effective activism is to gain a right understanding of one's sphere of influence, and students can most feasably do this by working on strictly campus-related tasks. As skills and reputations develop, community and campus activists may find advantage in coalition work, or in the apprenticing of individual students to community groups. This will be easiest for students who live off campus and already maintain ties with town residents. Naturally, different groups and individuals have their own areas of preference; but the acid test of what a student group should do is visibility of results. Those interested in addressing poverty will find no shortage of disempowered low-income people right under their noses; a large proportion of the Indiana University staff qualifies for food stamps on present wages. Environmentally-minded groups can work toward energy and food audits of the university and other local institutions, and attempt to bring them into alignment with high standards of efficiency and ecological impact. The university's food supply, for example, is controlled by the Mariott corporation. Alternate modes of procurement, such as buying from local organic producers, should be evaluated in environmental and economic terms. Mariott's treatment of its workers in Bloomington could be another point of inquiry, as could the University's own business practices. The University's Noxubee County scandal of 1992-93 is a good example of how students can effectively focus on their immediate surroundings. This was a case where land for a toxic waste site in Noxubee County, Mississippi was to be sold through a fundraising body known as the IU Foundation, with covert and dissembling moves made at many steps. Campus and community activists, both in Bloomington and in Mississippi, joined forces to try and block the land sale and to compel the Foundation and its directors to divulge information related to the dealings. Although unsuccessful on the surface, these efforts bought some needed time and served to develop awareness of local conditions and relationships not considered before. And so it should be. Focussing on national issues often serves only to inflate one's sense of importance, and produces no necessary change at any particular locality. But local change is exactly what a society functioning from the bottom up needs as its beginnings. The End Does "against student activism" mean that it's wrong for people in college to take an engaged interest in their surroundings? No, of course not. It's just a slap against a form of activism that only a few people can be part of. It means that students should take the task more seriously than they take themselves. They need to be aware that they live under special conditions, and get comfortable with the fact that those conditions will one day evaporate. And they should prepare themselves to remain active and effective in the world nevertheless.