Student Activism

The Associated Press recently reported that the President of the Un of Richmond, William Cooper, was pressured into resigning early because he made some comments that students and alums of the school found offensive. These students and alums combined forces with the University faculty and began a full-scale campaign against Cooper--complete with a website, online petition, and anti-Cooper paraphernalia (http://www.firecooper.com/main.html).

Reading about this campaign I was reminded of efforts by a group of Berea College students last spring. These students put together a well-organized a campaign [called “10x10” to reflect its goal of meeting 10% of BC’s energy from renewable sources by 2010] to convince the BC administration to begin placing solar panels on its buildings and to begin planning for the future procurement of renewable energy. As part of their efforts, the students scheduled individual meetings with administrators, organized an energy conservation campaign to help offset the additional initial costs of renewables, and solicited donations from BC staff, students, and faculty. While the administration eventually agreed to pay for the remainder of the solar array, and to place the array on the central “Alumni Building,” it balked at the rest of the proposal, including budgeting for future alternative energy installations and establishing an ongoing campus committee to study and implement renewable energy.

A small, but apparently growing, number of students have been trying to create an organization with a historically-charged name: Students for a Democratic Society.

I suspect this happens every five or so years, with starting national student activist organizations becoming an increasingly popular/easy thing to do because of the existence of the internet which both facilitates real connections and the illusion of connection.

I recall being on an email list, perhaps about eight years ago, where another small group was trying to start SDS. They didn't get nearly as far as this effort though.

I am working on converting the existing Student Environmental Action Coalition website so that it runs on Civicspace/Drupal.



Check out the
New Version




Old Version



I still need to do some work on the SEAC logo, the color scheme, increasing the visibility of the navigation menu, and I'm going to rewrite all the forms so that they aren't so long (we had some 400+ line html pages) and to switch from using CGI to PHP for the form processing.



Some of the Advantages that I came up with for advocating this transition include: