			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.
