The Problem With (Some Blogging About) Youth Activism

Courtney Martin, who has been writing some interesting articles about progressive youth activism over at the American Prospect, has a new piece up today, The Problem with Youth Activism, about the relationship between student fees/government budgets and the quality of campus activism.

Martin's thesis boils down to this - Millennials on campus are an over-scheduled, go-along bunch engaging in timid and milquetoast activism, and their reliance on student activity fees and administration approval is in large part to blame. Conclusion: We need to decouple student activism from student fees and return to a time when youth activists had fire in their belly and weren't afraid to channel their anger into . . . something.

Martin bases this thesis on her experience traveling and delivering a few addresses on college campuses over the last few weeks. She even has the obligatory introductory anecdote that they teach you to write in J-school to prove her point. Despite that, I think that Martin is getting this story wrong. Or at the very least not seeing the forest for the trees.

Her first assumption is that campus administrators maintain some sort of micro-managed control over student governments and how student activity fees are spent. They don't. Students themselves disperse that money to a wide array of organizations, from Students Against Sweatshop to the College Republicans. Only rarely does a university administration step in to this process.

Martin makes two other assumptions: the first is that there are no radical politics on campus anymore, and the second that youth activism is solely limited to what happens on campuses. These are both inaccurate.

Talk to the students at Harvard about their sit-ins in favor of a living-wage for campus janitorial staff, or the hundreds of students at NYU who protested the College Republicans Illegal Immigration Hunt. I'm pretty sure those are both examples of the kind of action that Martin laments is missing on college campuses, and yet there they are. And both attracted national media attention, and the Harvard sit-ins actually achieved its desired results. For a more recent example, check out this YouTube video from the University of Florida that is making the rounds today:

If Martin believes that there is no youth activism outside of college campuses, I think she should stop hanging around college campuses. 80% of what has been written on this blog is about activism among youth that happens off of college campuses, and it is a myopic view that thinks that 21% of all 18-29 year olds, clustered in gated communities, account for 100% of all activism. This is as true in the realm of electoral politics as it is in the world of issue-based activism. In fact, Martin will be the first reporter that I point to my 11 Tips for Covering the Youth Vote. In this case, Martin has violated Tip #1 and mistakenly equated "youth" with "students" when she writes: Today's youth activism is largely enacted within the gated fortresses of higher learning.

My final argument with Martin is that she neither turns a critical eye to the consequences of what she proposes nor offers any real solutions to the problem she's trying to identify. Historically, one of the greatest challenges facing progressive youth activists has been securing adequate funding for their work. In fact, in the 70s and 80s (and even to an extent today) Conservative activists have fought to pack university boards of regents with conservative faces, and they have trained their members to run for student government and take control of the university student budget committees. All of this was in an attempt to defund the left on campus.

Fortunately, these groups failed. USSA and the PIRGS (who bore the brunt of these assaults) are still around and active and fighting for progressive causes on campus. Progressive student organizations, even radical ones, are not in danger of losing their funding. And if by chance they do, it is a rare exception, not the rule as Martin's piece implies. In fact, from the mid 1970s, when the PIRGs sprung up through 2003 when independent money started pouring in to progressive youth politics, student activity fees were the only source of money going towards progressive activism at a time when the Conservative money machine was pumping tens of millions of dollars a year into groups like Young Americans for Freedom.

Since 2003, independent funding for progressive youth organizations has increased, a point also glossed over by Martin. Student and student orgs can now apply for money for anti-war activism from Campus Progress, among other organizations now supplementing the work of student groups on campus. But these new funding streams pale in comparison to the total amount of money that campus groups nationwide receive from student fees. What Martin proposes would literally knock the legs out from under many student organizations.

Additionally, Martin no where makes mention of the effectiveness of the organizations she critiques, or offers proof that they would be more effective if they cut ties with student government. Instead, Martin is offering us a campus-based youth movement that brazenly thumps its chest louder, but, with less resources, would likely accomplish much less.

All this said, it would be great if more outside money came into support progressive campus activism, as it does from the conservative side of the aisle. And maybe, as Martin suggests, we would see a more aggressive student movement against the war, or climate change, or poverty. It would also be great if someone came and paid my student loans, but until that happens I'm going to keep paying them off myself one day at a time. Until Martin can prove that her suggestions can create a more effective and progressive student movement on campus, and finds an alternative way to fund that new movement, I don't think any campus group should decline their fair share of the university student budget pie.