Amnesty International Global Write-a-thon!

Dear friends (and people I thought would be interested),

After a long struggle, we have finally secured a real room and time for the Amnesty International 2008 Global Write-a-thon! It will be held in 319L South Case Hall Tuesday December 9th and Wednesday December 10th from 1-6pm. PLEASE TELL EVERYONE in your student groups and friends too! Also, for those who aren't sure what this event's about, Amnesty supporters around the world will write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience and human rights defenders at risk of severe human rights violations. We will be writing to governments and others in positions of power on 14 different cases. I really want this to be a success, so please stop by, write a letter (or as many as you want), and save some lives. More information can be found at their website: http://www.amnestyusa.org/individuals-at-risk/global-write-a-thon/page.do?id=1108452

Thank you!
Allie

the slacker uprising and revolution?

Armed with underwear and ramen noodles the youth of America are set to overthrow the failed system! They will wait no longer, they will sit no more and they will apathetically listen to no one but Barack Obama anymore. Young people are fed up, that is for certain, but to what extent and will their record numbers in the polls really revolutionize American political life?

Michael Moore recently released his fifth major film, Slacker Uprising and is giving it out for free (download from site).

"Slacker Uprising" takes place in the wake of "Fahrenheit 9/11," during the run-up to the 2004 election, as I traveled for 42 days across America, visiting 62 cities in a failed attempt to remove George W. Bush from office. My goal was to help turn out a record number of young voters and others who had never voted before. (That part was a success. Young adults voted in greater numbers than in any election since 18-year-olds were given the right to vote. And the youth vote was the only age group that John Kerry won.)

While this may have been a failed experiment in mobilizing young people to actually effect change, we may be able to see some of the results in this year's election combined with a number of other factors. In the primaries, the youth vote was very strong - more young people than ever before voted in the primaries. This coming election there are so many young people registered and registering to vote that I would not be surprised to see the youth vote carry some regions. With the candidates picked and running through the mud, the real question becomes: is voting really the most effective way to make change? Is voting for one man or the other really going to show us a reversal in American political action?

At the end of the movie trailer, Michael Moore says, ". . . the young people of America, you're the ones who are gunna do it, you're leading the revolution."

Getting young people out to vote will not show us a different America. Granted this is a great chance to get more young people involved in civic and community action, but the chances are slim if the movement only works through ramen and registering. The opportunities for long-term engagement need to be offered if young people are going to really make change in this country. The young people of today are hardly prepared to lead a revolution in America. If we look back to the 60s and 70s (an era of high political stakes, massive movement building, and student protest) we can see a different type of young person.

Today young people are tucked away, sheltered, and left unaware of the wide world outside. In the 60s you had students who were raised by parents affected by crises, they were first generation at college, they were raised in the steel mill, they were right up close to the issues of the day. Not to mention they were raised during the build up of a very active time with the Civil Rights Movement coming to a peak and that morphing into a number of other issues. Students during that time were able to get involved because they felt marginalized even with their middle class college backgrounds. Today, students are also marginalized and excluded, but young people cling to a apathetic stance as opposed to an involved one. This may be a result of our upbringing. The best student movement examples come from Berkley California with the Free Speech Movement (FSM). What resulted as the FSM moved from Civil Rights to Free Speech to ending the Vietnam War to spurring a counter culture, was a split thinking. One track that led people to think that the students were dirty hippies who were bad for challenging the status quo. The other track led people to romanticize fighting the man and rioting against the system. This romanticizing has led many people to try to recreate movements of the past.

Probably one of the most detrimental results of the 60s and 70s student activist era was the institutionalizing of campus activism. In a documentary that I viewed about the FSM it was clear to see this new mode of control take place as students were allowed to 'table' on campus. Now in order to take any action on campus you have to register, open a student account if you plan to raise money, file your planned events, get proper security if it is a large event, and jump through any number of hoops to be approved to engage in activism. In December 2007, Matt Birkhold wrote on student power and activism,

". . .colleges want to make sure that students do not get too radical and recreate the late 60s. To accomplish this, they monitor everything student groups do. When student groups get too radical or begin to question university policies, they typically lose university support. Because students want to get their message out, they create flyers that will be approved by the university. Unfortunately, this is too big of a compromise because all the time students spend getting flyers approved could be spent organizing or studying. By continuing with university approved activism students are giving up a great deal of power and giving the university far too much. This must be seen as both a diversion and a way to absorb radicalism."

University administrations learned from the past so that events of that era could never be repeated. Student activism has been boxed in and so most students wouldn't even imagine some of the most effective actions to make change on their campuses. To quote FSM leader Mario Savio,

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

The idea of ungovernability is how real change occurs, when something is ground to a halt it is forced to engage that which is preventing it from continuing. This was a tactic used throughout the 60s and 70s as well as during actions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Making the townships ungovernable was how the black majority was able to force change.

In light of this, Universities have created a sterile vacuum for student action within the campus setting. For one example, during the 80s on Michigan State University's (MSU) campus students took over the administration building to demand a more diverse faculty. This was effective because it ground the university to a halt. All money was moved in and out of the administration building. Since they took over on pay day, and for a prolonged time after, the finances of the university were shutdown. Sadly, these movements were phenomenas, after negotiations were entered and actions were said to be taken - the follow up was gone because the movement has dissipated. Piecemeal outcomes were won for a long and often violent movement building. As Nelson Mandela noted, the oppressor defines the nature of the struggle. When Reagan had the national guard corral and gas students at a peaceful rally at Berkley, that marked the end of a long period of highly involved student activism.

Yesterday, Barack Obama came to speak at MSU's campus as the most recent presidential election draws ever closer. The student turnout was incredible, Obama's speech the usual, but still good. However the whole time I couldn't help but think about how sterile an environment this was for student activism and political involvement. Everyone is corralled into a small area, the police are everywhere, no signs are allowed, and the politician isn't there to talk to you. He is there to deliver sound bites to the press and media, your concerns are not that important. It almost felt like a day wasted on youth - get out of class, skip this, miss work - to hear a presidential candidate deliver My vote in Michigan as far as the Presidential election is concerned does not matter. Right, it is unimportant, since we have a winner take all system and McCain is pulling his campaign out of Michigan, Barack Obama will take the state and I won't even have to vote. This is where it is important to remind people that there is more than one man to vote for this election (and not even voting per say). I am a strong proponent of involvement in local politics because that is all that really matters.

And so back to the idea of a Slacker Uprising, we have a long way to come if we are going to have a mass movement of students. They may be going to the polls, but we need students running in the city councils, volunteering in their neighborhoods, taking action for their local environment, and caring for their communities. The opportunity and threat present in the 60s is not here today. The average college student is not going to jump into a rally because they see no need to. I agree with Michael Moore on one thing and that is the belief that it will be young people who make the greatest change in America. I firmly believe that young people are the key to social change. This can be evidenced by the 60s and 70s, and even today. I see its potential, but I am not sure that just engaging young people to vote is the best way. There needs to be a more comprehensive knowledge of how things are before involvement will lead to a revolution of sorts. We cannot seek to recreate the past, we need to learn and develop new tactics, we need to research how our power as students and young people can best make change. Birkhold reminds us that, "Students have power; they just have to learn how to use it."

Is participation to perpetuate an extremely flawed structure better than choosing rather to engage people and work for a justice deferred by that structure? The one decision here is the power in your right (or left) hand on election day - will you only check a box (fill a bubble, etc.), or will you help ideas become more than paper promises?

Previously posted on the Young People For Blog.

The Lessons of the Weather Underground

Former student radical Mark Rudd explains where he went wrong—and how young people today can learn from his mistakes.

By Te-Ping Chen | January 29, 2008 | Click here to read the original article and comments on Campus Progress.


Activist Mark Rudd, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), addresses students at Columbia University, May 3, 1968. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In the middle of a soliloquy on the challenges of student organizing, Mark Rudd, former national secretary for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—a radical student organization that in the 1960s boasted a membership of about 100,000—surprised me. “Have you ever been in love?” he asked abruptly. Startled, I hesitantly responded, “Yes.” “Me too,” he told me. “Only I was in love with a country.”

According to Rudd, that emotion pushed him to do crazy things. Though SDS was founded in 1962 as a nonviolent organization, with race riots brewing in America’s major cities in 1969 Rudd and several other SDS leaders began agitating for militant action. They formed a militant faction, the Weathermen, which eventually renounced SDS and emerged as the radical guerilla organization the Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground set its sights on the revolutionary overthrow of the United States government. Its members preached sacrifice of privilege and solidarity with anti-racist struggles from Vietnam to America’s ghettos. As one of its leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, said, “White youth must choose sides now. They must either fight on the side of the oppressed, or be on the side of the oppressor.” During the 1970s, the Weather Underground staged over a dozen bombings at sites ranging from the New York police department to the Pentagon. Aside from one accidental detonation that killed three Weathermen, the group did not inflict any casualties.

Today, Rudd is unsparing in his critique of the organization he helped found. “It was juvenile, it was less than juvenile,” Rudd said. Though the Weather Underground gained rapid notoriety for its views, the group, Rudd argues, helped pave the way for the unmaking of the student left. By discarding SDS and pursuing militancy, says Rudd, the Weather Underground abandoned the basic principle of any strong political movement: a commitment to organizing. According to Rudd, this is a legacy that persists in contemporary student movements. Failure to do the hard work of organizing, Rudd said, is what continues to hold progressive students back today, even as they try to piece together new methods of political engagement.

* * *

Though Rudd is cynical about much of his tenure as a student leader, one period of time for him remains untarnished: his years at Columbia University from 1965-1968.

Growing up in New Jersey as the grandson of Jewish immigrants who believed America could do no wrong, it was a shock for Rudd when he crossed the Hudson River and came in contact with his peers’ anti-racist, anti-imperialist critique of America. Rudd watched student uprisings taking place from France to Mexico to China—the world seemed poised on the brink of global revolution, and Rudd wanted to join in.

At the time, Rudd said, SDS—including members who would become part of the Weather Underground—was defined by its commitment to base-building. Dorm-storming, canvassing and teach-ins were staples of the organization’s constant education and recruitment. “We had circles of hundreds and hundreds [of supporters], and the circles grew and grew,” said Rudd, who became Columbia's chapter chair in 1968. “That was the essence of what we were always doing: growth.”

When the Tet Offensive and assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. shocked the nation, SDS had a broad and ready base. That April, Rudd led hundreds of students in the seizure of several university buildings in the legendary 1968 Columbia strike, which eventually drew the overwhelming support of the university's students and faculty. The strike—which lasted the rest of the academic year—ignited headlines nationwide and gave rise to other campus protests under the Ché Guevara-inspired slogan, “One, two, many Columbias!” (Meanwhile, other young activists were protesting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an effort chronicled in the new film “Chicago 10,” which Campus Progress screened at recent events in Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C.)

After the strike, Rudd was expelled. He began traveling across the country as an SDS organizer, and became increasingly convinced of the need for further militant action. At the SDS convention the following year, Rudd and 10 other SDS members presented a paper advocating armed struggle, entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” They argued that it was the responsibility of white, middle-class youth to sacrifice their privileged positions and unite in the "Third World"'s struggle by bringing the anti-imperialist, anti-racist war to the United States.

“We thought the bolder we were, the more people would want to join us,” Rudd said.

They were wrong. In 1969, the Weathermen called for “working-class, revolutionary” youth to “fight the pigs” in Chicago on the second anniversary of Guevara’s death, an event the press expectantly dubbed the “Days of Rage.” Though Rudd and his compatriots hoped an angry mob of thousands would converge in Chicago, only several hundred showed up. The band worked diligently to create chaos, smashing windows and assaulting police officers, but the event fell far short of the apocalyptic tide of violence the Weathermen anticipated.

“That would’ve been the moment to say, hey, this isn’t working,” said Rudd, who lived for seven and a half years as a federal fugitive during his time with the Weather Underground, working menial jobs from New Mexico to New York and living under an assumed name. “Anyone logical would’ve realized. But we were idealists, and we rationalized it.” From their first radio-broadcast declaration of war to the series of ponderous communiqués the group subsequently authored, the Weather Underground continued to prefer self-expression to political action. “Our idea of organizing,” said Rudd waspishly, “was running down the street waving an NLF [Nationalist Liberation Front] flag.”

“People only get won over through person-to-person engagement, not through spectacle,” Rudd said. “But self-expression is not the same as organizing. The problem is very few people today know this simple truth.” Though the Weather Underground’s leaders’ flair for theatrics made for tantalizing media headlines (and the riveting, though conspicuously indulgent 2002 documentary The Weather Underground), their political posturing did little more than alienate the anti-war movement and give the Nixon administration further leeway to impugn the student left. And while the group tried to take on a mantle of sacrifice for America’s racially oppressed, the Black Panther Party’s Fred Hampton characterized the Weathermen as “opportunistic, individualistic, anarchistic, and Custer-istic.”

Worse still, Rudd said, their actions undermined the strength of the leftist student movement he and others had worked so hard to build. In the wake of the 1969 convention, the SDS imploded in a paroxysm of factionalism. “I’m not at all proud of that,” said Rudd, who today lives as a retired community college teacher in New Mexico. His federal charges were dropped after he surfaced in 1978—the government had used too many illegal tactics trying to track him down to successfully prosecute him.

* * *

Fast forward 40 years and the student left has yet to reclaim the power that was scattered with SDS’s demise, according to Rudd. While his generation grew up learning from the Civil Rights Movement and the labor movement, today’s youth, Rudd argues, lack instruction on how to do the hard work of person-to-person organizing. Instead, contemporary youth are left with the iconographic photos of protests from the sixties—and little understanding of the work that inspired such protests in the first place.

After all, the images of protests that arouse such nostalgia today do not reflect the realities of organizing in the 1960s, Rudd agrued. Though civil disobedience, sit-ins, and strikes received publicity, such actions were only the face of the substantive education and recruitment happening beneath the surface. At Columbia, for example, the milling masses of protestors “really only came out of four years of hard organizing,” Rudd said. “People today still don’t understand that.”

When I brought up Thomas Friedman’s “Generation Q” article—which lambasted my generation as a too-quiet political force content to voice our politics through mouse clicks—Rudd immediately latched onto the topic. With the rise of the Internet, communication tools for the contemporary generation are more accessible than ever, yet with a lack of models to turn to, the real cornerstones of movement-building are missing, Rudd argued.

So who or what should students today turn to? Read Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Rudd said. Read about Ella Baker and how she inspired people by teaching them about their own power. The key to action, Rudd argued, is organizing.

Today, high school and college students across the nation are taking that message in hand, reviving SDS and kick-starting its legacy for the 21st century. Since the group was officially re-launched in January 2006, SDS has expanded to over 100 college campuses and dozens of high schools.

Though the new SDS pays homage to its predecessor of the 1960s in name, the groups’ similarities end there. While the old SDS was structured along strict hierarchical lines, the new SDS operates as a decentralized network united by a boots-on-the-ground attitude that emphasizes local action and chapter autonomy. Chapters share an anti-war focus but remain committed to diverse campaigns, tackling a variety of issues from student fees to immigrant rights.

As an organization, members say, SDS remains committed to building a broad coalition of progressive students and avoiding the internal power struggles that haunted its previous incarnation. At Lewis and Clark College, 20-year-old member Guy Dobbs said, the chapter rotates meeting facilitators and has a strict commitment to sharing authority. Above all, building a strong base of activists is key. “[The old SDS] leaders lost faith in the ability of mass movements and turned inward on themselves,” said Dobbs. “My hope is that the new SDS will continue to grow and reach out.”

But achieving these goals isn’t easy. “It’s pretty hard to get people to engage in this kind of [organizing] work,” said Elena Blanc, a member of Reed College’s SDS. “It seems ideas about what it means to build a movement and to build power through popular support have been forgotten.” Because much of the work in recent years has been focused on single issues—like environmentalism or women’s rights—it’s easy for students to feel disconnected, Blanc said. In particular, the ubiquity of online activism has contributed to a sense of powerlessness, she argued, “because it hasn’t really engaged people, they have no control or investment in it, and it’s not helping them developing their own leadership skills.”

Meanwhile, Rudd argues, the rise of the Internet and a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry have simultaneously encouraged youth to define themselves by their consumer choices, not their politics. Today’s youth are “just stuck in their countercultural niches,” Rudd said: “I’m hardcore punk, I’m west-coast hip-hop, I’m nouveau punk, and so on.” Rudd argues that clinging to such identities—what he calls, quoting Freud, the “narcissism of small differences”—keeps youth voices trapped in the entertainment world and invisible in the political realm.

“The students today are barely starting [to organize] and they need models,” Rudd said. “The advantage at Columbia was, we were red-diaper babies and many of us had been involved in the civil rights movement.”

If students had a better sense of their own power, it would be possible to restart another broad-based student movement like SDS, Blanc argues. “Students do care, and they know what’s going on,” she said, cautioning against mistaking lack of action for apathy. From her experience in college, though, “they don’t really see any way that they can impact [the system], and so they stop engaging and don’t act, because otherwise it’s just too frustrating.”

But fear of failure, Rudd believes, isn’t license to look away. “This country is like a giant aircraft carrier, and you’re trying to change the direction, and it’ll take generations, but you’ve got to start!” he said. “[It’s] nearly impossible, but…has to be done.”

Looking back after 40 years, Rudd said that they only thing he is "really proud" about "is having been a part of the anti-war movement, in which millions were involved." He added: "To the extent that anything I did worked against the student left, or destroyed SDS—those are some of my biggest shames.”

But Rudd acknowledges that his generation’s time is over. These days, Rudd said, he’s a liberal Democrat, not a radical. “I think being a radical’s a lot better than being liberal,” he told me. “I just don’t have the energy anymore.”

“I had my heart broken by this country,” he said, “and so could you.”

Te-Ping Chen is a senior at Brown University.

The New Face of the Campus Left

article | posted January 26, 2006 (February 13, 2006 issue) on The Nation by Sam Graham-Felsen

When a group called Campus Progress launched its effort to promote progressive values on college campuses in the fall of 2004, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wondered: "Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?"

The assumption that America's campuses are impenetrable bastions of liberalism--where left-leaning faculty predominate, progressive student activism flourishes and conservatism is fiercely marginalized--still rules the day. But in reality, since the 1970s the conservative movement has become the dominant political force on many American campuses. This sea change is not simply a reflection of some students' increasingly right-wing views. Each year, conservative groups pour more than $35 million into hundreds of college campuses. They pay for right-wing speakers, underwrite scores of student papers, provide free leadership training and cushy internships, and equip thousands of new activists with talking points, discipline and missionary zeal.

Today's campus right is unified, on-message and passionate--in other words, part of a genuine movement. By contrast, the campus left is disparate, undisciplined and segmented along ideological and issue-based lines. Student progressives have struggled for decades with not only a lack of cohesion but a dearth of resources. "We didn't have our act together," says Joshua Holland, a fair-trade and antiwar activist who graduated from the University of Southern California this past spring. "We tried to keep things nonhierarchical and loosely structured, but at the end of the day, there was a lot of running around in circles, and we weren't getting anything done."

CONTINUED BELOW
It's a familiar lament among the two dozen student progressives I talked with for this article. But help has arrived. After three decades of unanswered advances by the right, the progressive movement is no longer leaving students to fend for themselves. Campus Progress--a project of the Center for American Progress (CAP), one of the country's premier think tanks--is the largest of a handful of organizations that have emerged in the past year to counter the right's campus operations. These groups are offering resources, ideas and training designed to patch up many of the holes that have long deflated the student left. But in attempting to forge a widespread student progressive movement, they face many of the same quandaries that loom large for American progressivism as a whole: What values should define the movement? What tactics should be embraced? And perhaps most difficult of all, to what extent does striving for results mean sacrificing strong principles?

Ever since the heyday of left-wing campus activism in the late 1960s and early '70s, progressive students have struggled with looking frivolous, reactionary or cliched to their peers. At the University of North Carolina senior Jessica Polk says students have long been "sick of what the left is doing--they want to walk to class without being handed a flier about a rally or vigil."

Meanwhile, student conservatives have managed to balance organizational and ideological discipline with ragtag rebelliousness, positioning themselves as perpetual underdogs on oppressively liberal campuses. Armed with their version of a screw-the-man mentality, the student right's activism is often shocking: affirmative action bake sales where white students are charged more for cookies than blacks, for instance, or immigrant hunts where students dressed in Border Patrol uniforms chase targeted "illegals" with water guns. As tasteless and offensive as such stunts might be, they make waves on campuses and garner national attention for the movement.

"This is the South Park generation," says Matt Singer, a junior at the University of Montana and creator of the popular left-wing blog Left in the West. "The conservative activism is fun, and it rings with the students in the same way that the left did in the '60s and early '70s."

"The right actually ends up looking cooler than the left," agrees Mani Mostofi, who recently earned his master's degree at the University of Texas. "I don't know how this is possible, but it's true!"

For progressive student activists, attention-getting victories have also been scarce. There have been isolated triumphs in the past year: successful student-led living-wage campaigns for employees at Georgetown University and Washington University of St. Louis, and the multi-campus Taco Bell boycott, which helped secure a significant raise for the fast-food chain's tomato pickers.

The most widespread disappointment has been the failure to generate a sustainable movement opposing the war in Iraq. While student mobilization in the run-up to the war was massive in scope and energy, the typical problems plaguing the campus left--ideological splits and lack of organization--have caused the movement to fade considerably. "It was really a lost cause," says Yale University junior Jared Malsin, "because there was a great deal of infighting among different factions in the movement." Some student progressives wanted to focus on the fight to keep military recruiters off campus; others were divided over whether to call for immediate withdrawal of US troops. Plus, says Malsin, "there was waning interest in fighting it because it seemed like there was so little we could actually do as students."

Frustrations abound, but the emergence of national progressive organizations on campus has given many student activists renewed hope. In its first year Campus Progress has provided progressive students with tools they've never had before: money and a sense of unity. While its $1.25 million projected budget falls well below the more than $10 million of the right-wing Young America's Foundation, Campus Progress has made an immediate impact. Wayne Huang, editor of Cornell's student progressive publication, Turn Left, has seen his paper "go through a shocking transformation in little under a year," thanks to funding from Campus Progress. On twenty-seven other campuses, formerly cash-strapped student left publications are finally competing with conservative papers, publishing regularly and printing on high-quality paper. At its virtual meeting place, CampusProgress.org, students from across the country are sharing ideas and getting advice on how to communicate their values from the likes of Senator Barack Obama. Features like "Know Your Right-Wing Speakers" and "Crib Sheet" provide concise talking points for fighting the right.

CONTINUED BELOW
For the first time Campus Progress has given progressive students a sense that they, like the campus right, are part of a tangible movement. When 600 progressive students convened in Washington, DC, last summer for the first annual Campus Progress National Student Conference, many felt a profound sense of relief. "For so long there's been a disconnect of dialogue between progressives," says University of Kentucky junior Yuriy Bronshteyn. "There's been nothing central to look to." The mere existence of an organizational infrastructure seems miraculous to Bronshteyn, who says, "This is almost like a star that we can all see in the sky every night--it can give us the feeling that we're all fighting the same fight."

As Campus Progress works to build a national community for student progressives, Young People For (YP4) focuses on developing individual leaders. A project of People for the American Way, YP4 mirrors the right's Leadership Institute, which has trained more than 40,000 young conservatives, including movement heavyweights Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, since its inception in 1979. Providing a leadership pipeline for the left, YP4 has trained 126 students on forty campuses in its first year.

Jenny Parker, a YP4 fellow at Baylor University, wanted to organize a living-wage campaign on her campus--but had no idea how. After YP4 training in January 2005 in media outreach, coalition building and event planning, Parker says, "now we have the most organized campaign I could ever imagine." Especially helpful, she says, was YP4's guidance on framing the message. "Our audience at Baylor is very conservative and was turned off at the announcement of a living-wage campaign," Parker says. "We realized we had to spin our message a bit in order to gain support. We changed our campaign to the 1 John 3 Campaign"--a reference to a biblical passage urging aid for the poor. "Now our campaign is centered on the idea that this is our Christian obligation."

The largest Baptist university in the world has not yet passed a living wage for its workers, but Parker and her fellow activists are making headway with 1 John 3. They convinced the Student Congress to pass a resolution calling for a living wage, and have motivated 600 students to send postcards to the university president supporting the campaign.

Since the national groups have emerged, Joshua Holland, who was a YP4 fellow at USC, says campus progressives "actually get things done, which is a huge relief, because we're so used to not getting things done."

Progressives organized the most widely publicized student protest of 2005, the Princeton Frist-a-Buster. What began as a small event staged by eight students in front of the Frist Campus Center--each student took turns reading out of the campus phone book to protest Senate majority leader Bill Frist's threat to abolish the filibuster for judicial nominees--quickly grew into a nationwide phenomenon. Hundreds of students and professors, a Nobel laureate and two US senators took turns reading everything from Shakespeare to 3,500 digits of pi at Princeton, while students at thirty-five other campuses staged copycat events.

"We had a situation where the rhetoric was moderate, it was billed as nonpartisan and the people running it weren't the crazy activists but committed students who knew what they were talking about," says Princeton's Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a core organizer of the 384-hour talk marathon. "We spent hours learning the history, learning the rules, so we could talk authoritatively about it. When our peers asked us what we were doing, it was far more convincing to them."

CONTINUED BELOW
To David Halperin, director of Campus Progress, the Frist-a-Buster was the perfect model for the kind of movement his group wants to foster--clean, polished, on-message, but also humorous and inventive. The protest wasn't initiated by the national organization, he is quick to note, but by Siddique and his co-organizers. Campus Progress embraced the idea, provided resources and publicity and served, in Halperin's words, as a "megaphone" for the activists. That's how he wants his group to work. Unlike the largely top-town model of right-wing student advocacy groups, Halperin wants Campus Progress to be pushed "by the students' agendas."

But in choosing which student activities to support, which publications to finance and which speakers to bring on tour, Campus Progress can't help pushing an ideology. Some worry that the organization, run in part by former Clinton Administration officials, is more interested in promoting a centrist agenda than a strong, progressive alternative to the campus right. Several students who attended last summer's National Student Conference--where the keynote speaker was none other than Bill Clinton--felt that truly progressive perspectives were lacking. One panel, "Stronger and Smarter National Security," featured three panelists who, despite their criticism of George W. Bush's handling of the war, advocated expanding the military presence in Iraq. The subject of withdrawing troops was not even broached.

On the day of the conference, an article titled "What Is Progressive" was prominently displayed on the Campus Progress website, reading like a Port Huron statement for the new movement. "Progressivism," wrote Cornell University senior and Campus Progress intern Andrew Garib, "is far more flexible than any one ideology. Traditionally, conservatives see the world, especially human nature, as predictable and static. Liberals are often burdened with endless optimism--a belief that all problems can be solved through implementing utopian visions." The new student politics emerging from the conference should be defined not by revolutionary idealism, Garib wrote, but by pragmatism: "See the world for what it is, accept it as ever-changing and dynamic, and choose the best course of action in line with decidedly American values."

To Ishaan Tharoor, who edits the Campus Progress-funded Yale Hippolytic, Garib's manifesto was rife with centrist ambiguity. Tharoor fears the new progressive student movement will be dominated by "a cadre of résumé-pushing College Dems" who value expediency over principle. To Tharoor that's hardly the most "pragmatic" way to contest the right-wing movement's deeply held and sharply defined views. "Their extremism can only be taken to task by our own 'politics of conviction,'" Tharoor wrote on the Campus Progress blog. "As long as we cling to the...shadows of a Clintonian past and timidly skirt the issues that truly divide our country, that politics shall never emerge."

Halperin insists that Campus Progress is eager to bring students across the left's spectrum into the fold. If the ideological diversity of the students at the conference was limited, he chalks that up to the fact that Campus Progress recruited a large portion of the attendees from the DC-based progressive organizations where many work as interns. The 2006 conference, he vows, will reflect a broader outreach.

"My biggest concern from the beginning about CAP getting involved in the campus biz is that we would look like the McDonald's or Microsoft of progressive organizing--that it would be sort of corporate-style, clean, gleaming and neat, and not the kind of messy, grassroots, crunchy or angry version of what campus organizing is supposed to look like," Halperin says. "We've tried very hard, without compromising what we stand for, to make sure that we are serious about progressive values, and that we believe in inclusion."

Campus Progress has funded several student papers with strong left-wing content, like the University of Texas Issue, which recently featured an interview with a member of the radical Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. Thus far, Campus Progress has not engaged in any editorial oversight. "Anytime CAP is associated with something far left, it's going to hurt us," Halperin says, "but if we're censoring students, it's also going to be a problem." He acknowledges that "we'd have a problem if students were writing editorials in support of the Iraqi insurgency or calling for the elimination of the state of Israel."

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How, I asked, would Campus Progress respond if students requested radical intellectual Noam Chomsky as a speaker? After all, right-wing groups like Young America's Foundation almost exclusively fund speakers from the radical end of the right's spectrum. "Well, I don't think Chomsky would do business with us," Halperin replied. "But let's say we planned to bring Al Gore to campuses, and students said, 'How about bringing Ralph Nader to debate him?' If that's what they wanted, we'd do it."

Campus Progress began this past fall to offer student activism grants, some of which will promote causes that extend beyond the mainstream aims of the Frist-a-Buster--like the $1,000 given to students organizing a living-wage campaign at Vanderbilt University. According to director Iara Peng, YP4 also wants to emphasize bottom-up initiatives. "There was no way we could design this program from the top down and tell students what to do," says Peng. "We made a deliberate choice to break out of the right-wing model and allow students to define us."

On each campus, YP4 chooses three fellows (often with differing ideologies) who collectively agree on an activism project. YP4-sponsored activities have included living-wage and anti-Wal-Mart activism. Notably missing from the list of YP4 efforts--not to mention those sponsored by Campus Progress--is antiwar activism, arguably the core cause of the day among progressives. According to Peng, students from only one campus, Southern Methodist University, have expressed any interest in Iraq-related organizing. But even there, it didn't happen; the Southern Methodist students "decided instead to do coalition-building with progressive organizations."

"That was the only interest we received on forty campuses," Peng said. "That is not to say fellows are not organizing on Iraq--just not through the program."

In part, that's no doubt because of the group's philosophy. "We look for issues that will not polarize people but work toward common ground," Peng says. "We're not here to totally fight the right on campuses; in some ways we're here to work together toward our collective visions. If a Republican wants to work with us and work toward a better world, great."

Not all of the major efforts to organize campus progressives are coming from the outside. The Roosevelt Institution, founded by Stanford University students in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, is billed as the nation's first progressive student think tank. Providing much of Roosevelt's steam is executive director Quinn Wilhelmi, an ambitious and ultra-enthusiastic junior who quotes Spider-Man and Henry David Thoreau in the same breath. His message--that progressive students can and should be fighting in the war of ideas--is resonating with thousands of students across the country; the Roosevelt Institution already boasts chapters at 120 campuses.

In early October students from across the country met in Washington to present policy recommendations at the House office building's Cannon caucus room. Debuting their policy journal, the Roosevelt Review, students held forth on relatively mainstream topics ranging from AIDS prevention to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge crisis. At the launch of Yale's Roosevelt chapter this fall, students donned formal attire, nibbled on fancy hors d'oeuvres and watched a prerecorded video appearance from Hillary Clinton.

"This was not our parents' campus activism," Yale senior Sarah Laskow wrote of the event on CampusProgress.org. "So much the better, say the Roosevelt kids. We'd rather shine our shoes than dred our hair. We'd rather speak alongside our political leaders than shout out rhetoric from campus quads. We'd rather write policy papers than compose protest songs. The political elders have used us for our bodies and our energies. Now we want to offer them our minds. Our politics of revolution pushes not for actions but for ideas."

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Wilhelmi says that the Roosevelt Institution is not an attempt to replace grassroots activism but rather to complement it. "Nothing would have happened in the '60s without the sit-ins, but nothing would have happened without the Civil Rights Act either," he says. "I hope students will do both. I hope they'll do the sit-ins and then also work toward getting a city government to pass a law." He also maintains that Roosevelt will be a "big tent" for progressive ideas. Even though the organization is courting DLC darling Hillary Clinton, it has Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and liberal philosopher Richard Rorty on its advisory board.

Some progressives are suspicious of the professionalism of the Roosevelt movement, fearing it is already marginalizing traditional left-wing activism on campuses. "Anything could happen, but at this point the pendulum seems like it's swinging toward the center-left--Roosevelt, Campus Progress--the fine, upstanding, clean-shaven young white men standing up for this new brand of progressivism," said one student organizer (speaking on condition of anonymity because "they're already too powerful"). "It's no heir to SDS."

I asked the former president of Students for a Democratic Society, Todd Gitlin, now a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, for his thoughts about the trends on the new student left. "I think there's a desire for results, a hard-bitten realism," says Gitlin. "The primary goal is not some sort of symbolic display, or some sort of posture or attitude, but results. If that's what it means, then I applaud the turn to practicality. Today the far right is in charge, and I don't think you can create the possibility of broad-based radicalism until you defeat the far right. Put the center in power and then you have the possibility--or the luxury--of radicalism."

But SDS co-founder and lifelong activist Tom Hayden is wary of organizations that emphasize efficacy over ideals. "Students are being channeled into the Democratic Party or other mainstream institutions that will never bring about social change without a challenge and pressure from idealistic and free-thinking campus activists," says Hayden. None of the issues Hayden believes are "the great moral challenges before this generation"--the Iraq War, fighting the oil companies, resisting the pressure of military recruiters, debating alternatives to corporate-led globalization--are being pushed by the groups organizing campus progressives. "The immediate need," says Hayden, "is to say no to those who would channel students into safe alternatives to these challenges."

The right has created a student movement not simply by providing infrastructure but by promoting hard-core conservative ideology on campuses. The fledgling effort to organize campus progressives has provided the much needed infrastructure. But if progressive students are encouraged to embrace pragmatic politics over bold and sweeping challenges to the status quo, could something else--something essential--be lost? After all, radical students have stood at the forefront of many critical battles in this country, propelling social change by refusing to think within the accepted boundaries of debate. What will it mean for the progressive movement in the long run if cries for a new society are replaced by calls for incremental improvement? Is the future of the progressive movement better off in the hands of young pragmatists or young visionaries?

Power and the Problem with Youth Activism

Read the original post here on the Young People For Blog by: Matt Birkhold | Dec 24, 2007 |

Courtney Martin has recently noted that there is no shortage of activism of college campuses. However, according to Martin ("The Problem With Youth Activism," American Prospect, November 19), much student activism is ineffective because students have been pacified by what she calls the institutionalization of student activities and activism. In defense of student activists, Tim Fernholz ("The Kids Are Alright, Campus Progress, November, 27) argues that Martin is wrong and that her basic premise is indicative of a failure to understand politics. Fernholz goes on to argue that today's college activists are smarter then those of the 60s because they are willing to work within the system instead of engaging in protest, boycotts, and civil disobedience. Both Fernholz and Martin make some valid points. Yet neither mentions power in any regard. My aim is to make their conversation more complex by discussing how power impacts student activism.

Politics is primarily about implementing an agenda that will enable a particular vision of the world to become reality. This requires power. Consequently, politicians and their staff are constantly finding ways to retain power while aspiring politicians seek ways to gain it. In the realm of electoral politics, power is usually gained and retained through funding. In other realms however, power is found within people. This aspect of people power was understood particularly well in the 1930s and 40s by labor unions.

In 1936-37, workers at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan began a 44-day sit down strike where workers occupied the plant for 44 days and refused to work. The company responded by asking the state to send in the police and National Guard to put workers back on the assembly line. Workers continued to strike and, 44 days later, GM formally recognized the United Auto Workers. Importantly, these workers understood that without their labor, cars could not be produced. They saw themselves as the most important aspect of automobile manufacturing. They understood they had power at the point of production, and that when they exerted this power collectively, they had more power than the people who signed their checks.

Student anti Vietnam War activists began to understand their power at the point of production in 1967 when they shut down the Oakland, California Draft Induction Center. Antiwar activists realized that draftees were needed by the state if they were to continue producing war, and that if they could shut down the draft induction center, they could halt the production of war. Student power at the point of production was further realized during the great student strike of 1968 at Columbia University. Following the lead of Harlem community activists and black student activists, SDS leader Mark Rudd organized white students to occupy campus buildings understanding that if students occupied buildings, the research needed to produce weapons used in the war could not continue. These three situations are important because they provide examples of human beings exerting power at the point of production after the legal avenues of change had been exhausted.

It is this very point that Courtney Martin understands but Tim Fernholz fails to grasp. According to Fernholz, "the executive branch has the most control over foreign policy, and only when its occupant is against the war will we see real progress. Until then, young people must work on defining what type of foreign policy our generation should support." With such an approach, Fernholz has completely relinquished the power of human beings--student and non-student activists alike--to the executive branch of the federal government. By doing so, he becomes a prime example of the critique Martin makes of student activists. According to Martin, the problem is not that student activists do not care; the problem is that they do not see themselves as creators and controllers of their own lives and the world around them. Martin sites a study conducted on college students that found that the average college student today was 80 percent more likely to feel that his/her life was controlled by outside forces than students in the early 60s.

In the world that Martin would like to see, young people would not sit around and wait for power in the executive branch to change hands but would instead hold an event on the Washington lawn to put pressure on those who currently have power to change what they do with that power. As Fernholz points out, those in power are not always the enemy. However, when those who have power use it in a way that the people deem inappropriate, it is the duty of the people in a democratic state to hold those in power accountable. If those in power do not respond, the people have a duty to go outside the avenues of change provided by people in power and develop new ways to create social change. This basic concept that activists in the late 60s understood, today's young student largely fail to grasp.

One reason young activists fail to grasp this lesson stems from the cold war. Marx, the original theorist of people's power at the point of production, was made virtually off limits in US colleges during the cold war. Because of this, generations of activists and intellectuals have been denied a crucial lesson in creating social change. Another reason stems from the way in which college activism is designed to keep students from getting too radical. In conversations with student activists, I regularly ask the question, "Why does the university require you to get the posters you want hung approved?" Students almost always respond, "Because they want to make sure no one gets their feelings hurt." Students are right, that is part of the reason the University wants to approve all signs.

However, a second reason is that colleges want to make sure that students do not get too radical and recreate the late 60s. To accomplish this, they monitor everything student groups do. When student groups get too radical or begin to question university policies, they typically lose university support. Because students want to get their message out, they create flyers that will be approved by the university. Unfortunately, this is too big of a compromise because all the time students spend getting flyers approved could be spent organizing or studying. By continuing with university approved activism students are giving up a great deal of power and giving the university far too much. This must be seen as both a diversion and a way to absorb radicalism.

Because they need students' money, colleges cannot afford to throw all the activists out. Accordingly, students must begin to see that they are in a position to affect change. Before seeing this however, they must begin to understand that human beings create, sustain, and have the capacity to change institutions. When we are complicit with institutions, we are actively working to sustain them. When we agitate, we are actively involved in changing them. Students have power; they just have to learn how to use it.