after-school activities

In a post about a post in praise of a critique of a supposed revival of the SDS at American University, Michael Kazin notes the lack of student protest at Georgetown, where he teaches:

But activists who don't focus on electoral politics--or, as in the late '60s and early '70s, flip off the major parties altogether--seem far less numerous. At Georgetown, where I teach, pleasant spring and fall mornings bring out a dozen or so tables on the bricked-in quad (known as "Red Square" for its color, not the shading of its politics). Small knots of students promote pro-choice and pro-life and a living wage, recruit for various ethnic and race-based clubs, and sing the virtues of tutoring homeless children or teaching in an inner-city school. Hardly anyone on campus still defends the war in Iraq; even a student of mine who once interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib thinks the invasion was a stupid mistake. Still, it's been months since I saw or heard a single undergrad seek to channel that sentiment into protest. If anyone is trying to organize a local SDS chapter, they must be doing it exclusively on line.

One reads articles like this quite frequently, and certainly it's hard not to agree that there is a distinct disinvestment in protest culture at US universities. This is not to say that there aren't mobilized, engaged students - there certainly are. But, in my experience, like Kazin's, what protest there is seems to be limited to a very small subsector of the student body - a sort of special interest club like any other special interest club. There are small demonstrations, there are ubiquitous photocopies plastered on doors and walls, there are meetings and listservs and discussion groups and hosted speakers. But it never seems to grow or make much of a dent.

So the first item for discussion: do you think this is an accurate rendition of the situation at universities, at your university, if you're at one? Or is it stupid to fixate so strongly on what happens on campuses in the first place? We are used to thinking of students as the shock troops of revolt and protest, but this hasn't always - or even often - been the case when you take a slightly wider historical perspective.

Second item for discussion: Why don't articles like this ever try to make a real stab at why protest culture is now so anemic at universities? One either throws up one's hands ("politics have changed, huh...") or blames the kids, their cultural decadence (really, students today are more "decadent" than they were in the 1960s? Not sure of that...) or, more deviously, maps one's own political perversity on to the student body today (me as a kid = students in the 1960s / me as a grownup who writes for TNR = students circa now).

I think all of these answers are lazy and/or constructed in bad faith - some worse than others. What do I think is the issue? Personally, I think it's the pressures (both real and perceived, fantasized) of the labor market. The perceived diligence and persistence that it takes to stay ahead of the "acceptable life" curve (which of course varies depending on the university we're talking about - what is an acceptable end for many of my students would represent a catastrophic collapse to most Harvard students). Constant self-monitoring, constant presentation-of-self or anticipation thereof on the market of work and life and status, a grating sense that only the visible people matter is the name of the game. In particular, those students who might be the most likely candidates to participate in or even lead a protest movement - those in the humanities and social sciences - are haunted by a sense that everything worth doing is becoming increasingly impossible to do (collapse of the art market, collapse of the market for creative writing, rationalizing constriction of academia, etc etc) and thus in order to escape the soft hellishness of the cubicle, they need to keep their eyes on the prize.

This is an extremely worried generation of college students. Do you know how many nervous collapses (with hospitalization) happen in my undergraduate classes a semester? I'm teaching a single class of 45 undergrads this semester, and I've had 3 psychiatric hospitializations. I think, for reasons both real and not, students today are too stressed and anxious about their futures to worry about anything at all other than their school work, their internships, and the improbability that they will get to live the life that they would like to live.

The club tables that Kazin sees on the quad are an echo of the clubs they joined or led in high school. The spirit of protest has been pressured into the form of CV fodder; there is no time or energy for revolt save as an "after-school activity," a hobby.

How do I know? Because the same logic structures my own life and work. Obviously, obviously. I am terrified of losing what I have, or not getting what I ultimately want while simultaneously being incredibly disheartened at the absurdity and issuelessness of what it is that I do. Pseudonymous blogging is my after-school activity; it has likely the same use-value as plastering anti-war posters on the designated placarding walls on campus.

Comments

[Nate]

CR,

Thanks for this.

I want to make sure I get the argument. Is it "students on average are less political" or "students on average are (doing) less political (stuff) on campus"?

I suppose either way the two might conceivably feed each other. My impression in Chicago a few years ago was that students were an important constituency for antiglobalization circles, but that they didn't act on campus. Which might mean, among other things, that they were going to draw in less students who weren't already plugged in in some way.

Regardless of which is the case, it might not have big/deep explanations but might be smaller ones about how earlier cycles/student generations did or did not cultivate leadership. The pace of student life in terms of people graduating out is really high and the time it takes to develop into being committed and capable is pretty long too (many students do really impressive stuff for all that). So there's a distribution of more and less experienced and confident folks. The mores are going to generally be the engines of things. If their engine-ness doesn't involve sufficient cultivation of lesses into mores then when the mores graduate there's a relative loss of leadership and things have to start over again. I doubt that that's a sufficient explanation of present conditions, but I think it's likely a factor (and as such, it would lessen the all determining power of other factors we can think of, like tuition rates and admissions reqs).

take care,
Nate

[Madmouser]

You will probably elect not to post my response, but here it is anyway. All of you simply put, spew intellectual bullcrap. No one cares what you think, what you write or how much you love to hear yourselves speak. All they care about is what they have to do to make it. They are focused on 'making it', and none of you are their role models.

[Nate]

Sorry to comment twice, but I just read (very quickly) the posts and such you linked to. If anything, they're index of the authors being out of touch with the student left (I am too, for whatever that's worth, which is why I can't say what's the situation at the university I'm at). The Chronicle piece's linking of black bloc-ers to Weather would be laughable in its total lack of being informed if it weren't a not so subtle "these kids are future or maybe even contemporary terrorists". It's also indicative I think that none of the articles engages with anything written by SDSers nor offers anything positive to or for SDS, an implicit recognition of the out-of-touch-ness and the resulting lack of anything constructive to offer to students. Instead, nostalgia, doubts, and other forms of pouring water on an activity.

[Jodi]

I'm not sure if better late than never, but anyway, on my campus, some students are active. We still have take-back-the-night and events for gaypril and national coming out day. Most anti-war protests, though, were organized by faculty. College Republicans have been active, tying yellow ribbons around all the trees to 'support our troops', bringing in speakers, doing something with flags either for troops or fetuses. And, the students are starting various publications from different perspectives.

They don't seem as engaged as those supporting Solidarity in the early eighties or those at Columbia fighting for divestment in the later eighties. A few years ago, I was frustrated when a bunch agreed to circulate petitions to get Dean on the ballow; it snowed, and they all bailed.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
I'm curious, how visible (in the sense of or implied in the articles CR links to) is TBTN and queer related stuff at your U? Where I went to college that stuff was a huge deal for a lot of people (TBTN was enormous for me and was my first real involvement in a collective politcal thing), but I have no sense how notice-able it was for other people because I was plugged into those networks.
best,
Nate

ps- Mouser, it's a shame you feel the need to waste your time talking to people who you feel are a waste of your time. You should see a shrink about that, or at least make sure to get enough hugs on a regular basis.

[Bob Allen]

I note the desperate quality of Madmouser's post: we just "don't get it", it's all about "making it", not finding modes of resistance. The other 30 comments have parsed this to death, but I want to add that this phenom transcends academe, this mass psychosis that precludes resistance, and it takes two forms, either aggressive ideological compliance or a docile fatalism.

[Adam Kotsko]

either aggressive ideological compliance or a docile fatalism

and sometimes both.

"Deke:"

it's an odd comment from Kotsko yes, but; GO AWAY.