Student Activism FAQ By Aaron Kreider Who is Aaron Kreider? I am a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. I have been involved in student activism since 1993/1994 when I started attending Goshen College, mostly with Pax (a peace-based group that tackles many issues). Then I went to Notre Dame for graduate school and started the ND Progressive Student Alliance (PSA) which has been more focussed and tried to tackle one issue at a time. I’ve also volunteered a lot of time with the Student Environmental Action Coalition (two summers), and attended four of the last five SEAC National Council meetings. (I also attended two early STARC founding meetings, the DTI Council retreat before the founding of MDE-180, and a former SPAN national coordinator was in Pax so I feel qualified to comment on the state of student activism. In addition I’ve read extensively on student and social movements.) I’m currently active in SEAC, USAS, and PSA – the latter which is focussing on sweatshops. I’m also working on writing a master’s thesis on current-day student activism. What is Student Activism? Student (and youth) activism is action by young people, generally in schools (high schools, colleges, universities) who use non-institutional means (protesting, direct action, etc) to achieve progressive social change. This definition excludes social-service groups who fail to tackle the *causes* of injustice, as well as moderates or conservatives whose ideology blocks them from working for justice. Wasn’t Student Activism a “Sixties-Thing”? No! While student activism received a lot of media attention in the Sixties – this was partially because students were more active than the rest of (the mostly-conservative) society. In the Thirties students were, proportionally, more activist. Student activism is now more diffuse. Whereas students may have focussed on Vietnam, or Civil Rights during the Sixties now there are many issues (Mumia, gay rights, women’s liberation, racism, sweatshops, SOA, WTO, tuition, environment, animal rights). And with so many issues and a proliferation of organizations, it becomes less clear how much is happening. Also the media does not cover much. Student activism in the Sixties was at times way more confrontational – for instance the media will cover students burning down a ROTC building or confrontations with police (see the recent WTO protests) What national organization works specifically on peace issues? Student Peace Action Network – formed several years ago as the student wing of Peace Action. Small but growing. Publishes a monthly newsletter. Run by a paid national coordinator (hired by Peace Action – not elected). Has a National Council elected on a regional basis. What national organization works specifically on sweatshops? United Students Against Sweatshops. Has two staff, a coordinating committee, caucuses, working groups (for organizing things like conferences), and is run by conference-call democracy. What national organization works specifically on student-labor issues? The Student Labor Solidarity Network – A network of SLACs (student labor action coalitions), working on sweatshops, supporting campus workers, etc.. What ethnic/nationality based organizations exist? MeCHA – Chicano/a organization, originally founded in the early 70s that had a resurgence in the 90s. Black Radical Caucus has a youth/student section. What national organization works specifically on women’s issues? Feminist Majority started a campus program in 1997. What national organization(s) are more multi-issue? The following organizations I would call “multi-issue” as they work from a general progressive/radical approach. MDE-180: best fits this description. Very decentralized. Each chapter elects a representative who sits on the council. Roots in the anti-corporate power movement, but generally working to empower oppressed people (i.e. achieve democracy). STARC (Student Alliance to Reform Corporations): more anti-corporate focussed than 180. Also much more focussed on getting universities to do Socially Responsible Investing. Very new (founding conference was Nov. 1999). Despite the name, many members want to abolish corporations (so it’s not necessarily more reformist than other groups is this category). Growing rapidly. SURGE (Students United for a Responsible Global Environment): more peace-based (Ex. campaign against the School of Americas, ending sanctions on Iraq). Very loosely structure, no decision-making-body. Main organizing tool is its email list. Not tackling any environmental issues despite its name. What national organization works specifically on environmental/environmental justice issues? Student Environmental Action Coalition – since 1988, more radical and more environmental justice focussed than the others (thus addressing issues beyond traditional environmentalism – Ex. fighting NAFTA, WTO, etc). Run by a national council which is democratically elected on a regional basis. Has several very minimally-paid staff/volunteers in the Philadelphia National Office. Publishes student environmental magazine, Threshold, since 1989. Student Sierra Coalition – student affiliate of Sierra Coalition. Free The Planet – founded in 1995. What organizations are explicitly socialist? International Socialist Organization (ISO) – Does not have a youth wing, but many ISO members are young. ISO is very noticeable because members recruit (and sell newspapers) agressively to the point that they annoy a lot of people on the left. Democratic-centralist (i.e. ISO members must abide by decisions that are made by the group. Members must follow the party-line.) Heavily criticized by the left. Publishes “Socialist Worker.” Solidarity – socialist,feminist, democratic. Founded in 1986. Does some student organizing. Young Communist League – The communists are funny because they actually supported Clinton in the last election. The YCL is the official youth wing of the official Communist Party of the USA. Young Democratic Socialists – youth wing of the Democratic Socialists of America. More moderate than the ISO. Possibly the most funny & spirited litterature of any student activist group. Approximately 18 chapters. Believes in working within the Democratic party to push them towards a more progressive agenda. NYC office. Publishes “The Activist.” Youth for Socialist Action – nine chapters. Youth wing of Socialist Action. Trostkyite. Young People’s Socialist League – youth wing of the socialist party which has existed for eighty years and ran some presidential canidates like Eugene Debs. What is “conference-call democracy?” It is the extensive use of conference calls to make organizational decisions. It harks back to the New Left (groups like SDS), which favored participatory democracy (everyone who wants to participate in making a decision can). The idea is good, but the problem is that not everyone has the time (or money) to participate and that it can lead to a group of unelected people who can tolerate long meetings (or long conference calls) making the decisions. Another difficulty is length (discussions can last three hours and sap energy). STARC (especially), USAS, and MDE-180 (not as much) all hold conference calls to make most of their decisions. SEAC uses a variant practice, holding monthly Internet Relay Chat sessions for its National Council (and anyone who wants to attend) I believe this works better (if people have access to the internet) and is also cheaper (it’s free!). What is “email organizing?” It’s the idea that you can use email in specific (or the Internet in general) to actually organize student activists. USAS has been most successful with Internet-organizing, using its email list to build a network of a hundred schools (it was able to do this because everyone in the network was working on the same issue – very narrow focus). SURGE is another example as for many months it was but an email list (now it’s an email list which has held a national conference so identities are more congealed). What group tries to help build student activism in general, and network existing groups? The Center for Campus Organizing publishes Infusion, a national newspaper for progressive student activists. It also has published a book on Uncovering the Campus Right, a great really cheap organzing guide, and is working on a book on researching corporate-universities ties. They recently helped organize a student coalition against the WTO talks in Seattle. What have student activists done? (A very short history) In the 1930s students were very concerned with peace issues, probably as a result of WW I and growing fascism in Europe (hundreds of thousands participated in an annual “strike for peace”). World War II led to a sharp decline in activism which continued after the war (a very conservative period in US history). In the Sixties students first awoke to the injustices of segregation / racism with organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) . Southern students led the sit-in movement which led to the desegration of many stores. Students for a Democratic Society started as a small organization in the early 1960s. In 1962, over fifty people attended a conference at Port Huron, Michigan, and they agreed on the landmark Port Huron Statement which set out a reformist agenda for student activists. SDS took-off several years later, perhaps around 1965, with the beginning of the movement against the Vietnam war. SDS chapters had campaigns against racism, Vietnam, the Draft, ROTC, corporations, and for student rights. They occupied buildings and were subject to a lot of adminstrative and FBI repression. SDS peaked around 1968/69 with 100,000 members, then dying in 1969 as the organization had radicalized its goals from reform to revolution – and was subject to factionalism (partially due to infiltration of SDS by the Maoist “Progressive Labor Party” which attempted to take it over – but also because the leadership was way too radical compared to the average student). The biggest national student activist event was in May 1970, after four Kent State students were killed by the National Guard. About two million students went on strike – at many universities classes stopped. I’m not sure what happened in the Seventies, other than there was a strong diversification as the women’s, black, chicano, gay, native american, and environmental movements all grew (often a lot). The Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) were formed then – they are a way of institutionalizing activism, by having students fund it through referendums (students agree to pay a couple dollars per semester). In 1980, some activists gathered at Kent State (10th anniversary of the massacre), and founded the Progressive Student Network (PSN). PSN never grew that large, and was based in the mid-west. However it was the largest multi-issue national student network since SDS (and nothing larger has happened since). PSN never explicitly formed an “organization.” It published a newspaper and had a National Office in Chicago for a while as well as national (and possibly regional) conferences. Many groups still have names like Progressive Student Alliance because of PSN-ties. The major issues in the eighties were Apartheid (students tried, often very successfully, to get their universities to divest from corporations who were doing business in South Africa), CIA recruitment on campus, and Central American Solidarity (as the US was supporting the Contras and the brutal El Salvador regime). However there were many more issues as well. In 1986, 400 students attended a national convention at Rutgers to launch a national student organization – however the attempt failed (*launching a national student organization is a very tricky proposition*). Three years later, UNC Chapel Hill students held a national environmental conference which attracted 1800 people and they launched the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). SEAC grew rapidly in its early years, quickly becoming the largest student-activist organization. PSN had a burst of activity in 1990/1991 when large numbers of progressives tried to stop the US/UN coalition from attacking Iraq (Persian Gulf War), but faded away within a couple years (1992/1993). In 1995, there was a burst of organizing against the newly-elected Republican Congressional majority’s “Contract for America”. Actions were organized at over 100 campuses, with assistance from the Center for Campus Organizing (formerly the University Conversion Project). In 1996, SEAC had an organizational crisis which caused it to lose most of its funding and all of its staff – however since then SEAC has gradually rebuilt. In the fall of 1998, the Democracy Teach-In Council (who had sponsored teach-ins occuring at about 150 schools – in the past two years) held a Campus Democracy Convention at UW Madison and launched a progressive multi-issue national organization called “MDE – 180” (Movement for Democracy and Education). However the conference didn’t go as well as it could, and MDE now has only 12 official chapters (though growing). The biggest story of 1998-2000 is the student anti-sweatshop movement which grew from nothing to the largest coordinated national effort of its kind (100-150 campuses work on the same issue). United Students Against Sweatshops started as an informal network and recently was able to hire two staff and setup an office.