Campus Activism

Saturday night reading... check it out:

• Mother Jones and Campus Progress are looking for "campus hellraisers" to profile in the September-October 2009 issue of Mother Jones. Check it out (self-nominations are allowed).
• A "No on Gay Marriage" campaign is an epic fail with young people.
• Christian punk and heavy metal music is blurring the lines between young evangelicals and secularists.
• MTV has announced that TRL, having been canceled last November, will be replaced by the Alexa Chung Show. The new show reportedly will heavily emphasize Twitter through courting online reaction to its music videos and celebrity guests.
• Some good news and some bad news from a survey regarding youth (ages 13-29) attitudes toward the Green Movement:

  Good: Youth see the Green Movement as "responsible" and "cool," and they believe it to be a very worthy cause.
  
  Bad: Many youth believe the Green Movement to be too demanding on a personal level, too time-consuming and too inconvenient.

• Tens of thousands of young Americans will be educated and trained to deal with America's energy problem, thanks to President Obama.
• An article in BusinessWeek calls for more business schools to rein in Millennial entrepreneurs by focusing increasingly on problem-solving.
• Terry McAuliffe is seriously hemorrhaging some youth voters in Virginia's Democratic gubernatorial primary.

I was a bit inspired by Justin's post last week about ways students returning to school can buy their new gear in a sustainable way, and thought I'd revive an old post from way back in the day.

Every semester, college students spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on textbook purchases. Frequently these text books go for outrageous prices. Wouldn't it be great if some of that money could go towards your activism instead of into the pocket of publishers with dubious liberal credentials?

The College Democrats of Harvard University hit upon an easy way to do just that using Amazon.com’s Associates Program. The Associates’ Program allows third parties to refer book sales to Amazon by pasting a simple HTML badge into their website. Referrers can earn between 5% and 10% of the sales they direct to Amazon based on the volume of sales.

How did it pay off for the Harvard College Dems?

“Last year we sold $6000 through Amazon.com, earning the Dems about $360,” Dems Treasurer Harlan M. Piper ’08 wrote in an e-mail. “So far this year, we’ve sold about $1600, though we hope that number will go up as people buy more books!”

...

“It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s significant,” he said, adding that the windfall is enough to fund perks like pizza at general board meetings.

So how can you make this work for you on your own campus? It couldn’t be simpler:

• Sign-up for Amazon’s program (this will require a checking account or a PayPal account). For tax purposes and transparency, it’s probably best if this account is in the name of your organization.
• Paste the Amazon Search badge onto your group’s website. If you don't have a website, sign up for a free Word Press blog. Here's a look at what the Harvard Dems did:

• Request that all of your members, their friends, and anyone sympathetic to the goals of your organization buy their course books through the search badge. Use Facebook and anything other tool at your disposal to promote this fundraiser to as many students as possible.
• Rake in the cash.

Through their Amazon referral link, the Harvard College Democrats were able to raise $360 a semester. Not bad for some quick HTML work. With some good promotion via Facebook, and requests to get your non-political friends to support you through their own text book purchases, who knows what you could do . . .

If you're still fuming about that piece by Courtney Martin in the American Prospect, go check out this fantastic smackdown over at Campus Progress by Tim Fernholz, a senior at Georgetown University.

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.

Three years ago, in the wake of the 2004 election, we all had a sense that something was wrong with our democracy.

After Barry Goldwater's ignominous defeat in 1964 the conservatives had gotten organized and by 1980 were on the warpath. Since that day, it seemed, progressives had been stumbling around blindly -- either trying to obfuscate the debate, looking like wusses, or eagerly helping conservatives to undo all the progress of a fifty-year national consensus Roosevelt had begun with the New Deal.

In those heady days, Howard Dean had showed grassroots activism could counter the traditional conservative individual-donor advantage, the Rappaports were getting folks together and Rob Stein was on the road with his famous powerpoint, the Center for American Progress was forming, and works like Don't Think of an Elephant and the Death of Environmentalism essay were making the case that single-issue advocacy wasn't enough to fundamentally shift American values. Words like infrastructure, values, ideas, media, and think tanks were the bread and butter of the progressive lexicon.

At the time, I had just returned from leading a group of 135 Stanford students to knock on doors and turn out John Kerry voters in Nevada. After catching up on some long-overdue homework in a diner in Las Vegas on November 3, I returned back to my dorm room in Crothers Hall -- literally in the phallic shadow of Hoover tower -- to think about what was next.

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At the base of that tower is a plaque explaining that it is the only federal monument to president Herbert Hoover. Small wonder. Though Hoover's ideas -- that Americans would be better without "communistic" programs like like Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the FDIC -- had been seen as widely discredited by the 1932 election and the subsequent success of the New Deal, in that one lonely tower the spark had apparently been kept alive. Now, re-popularized by organizations like the Hoover Institution, we saw plausible efforts to take apart Social Security and gut the Securities and Exchange Commission.

If organizations like Hoover had restored the dream of a do-nothing government presiding over the economic ruin of middle class America, it was clear that we needed a "Roosevelt Institution" to bring back America's problem-solving spirit.

Worth checking out:

• TPM Cafe has a great article about expanding youth outreach into high schools, as well as links to some best practices and real-world examples.
• Future Majority friend and Living Liberally founder Justin Krebs spoke to the College Democrats about incorporating social and cultural interaction into their program and strategy. The Nation has the highlights from the New York State College Democrats Convention.
• While Justin is talking about socializing political communities, Matt Stoller of MyDD is talking about the potential in politicizing cultural communities like BoingBoing around progressive issues.
• Poor Dick Cheney. Even in blood red Utah they hate him. Check out this video of the BYU student protest of Cheney's commencement address (and watch how the school administration tries to suppress their dissent).
• Finally, because I promised, here's the video of "Gravel's Greatest Hits" from the Democratic Debate in South Carolina:

Update: I should note that I jumped the gun a little with this review. SFBO has not officially launched yet. I just happened to key into their prelaunch because I read the Barack the Youth Vote blog. The Obama campaign has contacted me to say they are aware of a lot of these issues and appreciate the feedback. So let them know what you'd like to see in future iterations in the comments, and bear in mind that I'm reviewing a beta product here.
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This is part of a running series of campaign youth website reviews. In previous installments I reviewed John Edward's OneCorp and Mark Warners's Youthroots.

Co-opted by the campaign months ago, Students for Barack Obama launched their new website this week. After their impressive emergence via FaceBook and demonstrated ability to turn Facebook energy into bodies on the ground, I was looking to see something equally impressive.

What I saw was basically a funnel. The new SFBO website is - mostly - a directory that allows visitors to find a local chapter or create their own chapter where none exists. Whichever option you choose, the site will funnel you into MyBarackObama.com, the campaign's social network organizing vehicle. Aside from links to the official Barack Obama FaceBook group and YouTube page, almost every link on the site directs the user into the main campaign website. That's not necessarily a bad thing - when I interviewed Tobin Van Ostern, one of the founders of Students for Barack Obama, he indicated that FaceBook wasn't scaling sufficiently as an organizing tool to accommodate the group's needs. Now that SFBO are an official part of the campaign, it makes sense to integrate their operations with the larger campaign infrastructure. But there's a lot missing here.

Attention Democratic Presidential campaigns and assorted grassroots youth groups. In light of recent scandals, and as part of their Debt Hits Hard campaign, Campus Progress has created a guide instructing students on how to organize for fair lending on campus:

Honest Lending, Fair Lending: A Guide to Exposing Conflicts of Interest in School Financial Aid Offices (pdf)

The guide is fairly comprehensive; it includes step by step instructions for navigating your school’s financial aid system and rooting out shady lending practices on campus, talking points on student debt, and links to related articles that could provide posts and posts worth of blog material.

Update: For clarity, based on a hurricane of comments over at Kos, I'm not suggesting that we don't ever protest anything (though the value of protest is a huge conversation worth having). I'm just saying that if that is your tactic, do it in a way that doesn't allow the college Rethugs to flip the situation on you and play the victim.

Update II: A commenter on Kos who claims to be a student at American University says that there was nothing thrown at Rove. I'm glad to hear that, and it goes to show that Republicans will try to distort what the Left does for their own gain no matter what. That said, I still think the point I'm making generally holds if we are talking about tactics that actually accomplish a positive goal on campus.
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So I can understand why this is really gratifying:

WASHINGTON -- White House Advisor Karl Rove was the target of a protest on the American University campus Tuesday night, News4 reported.

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.

But I've got to say it strikes me as an all around terrible tactic if you're goal is to actually change anything - nationally, or even just on your campus, which I would argue is equally important.

It may have felt really good to throw things at Rove. And he certainly deserves to be Frog-Marched out of the White House and hit in the face with tomatoes and other traditional rotten things. But here's what happens the next day. And the next couple weeks:

Republicans on campus will say that lefty campus activists overreacted. That the campus left played the role of Thought Police and tried to intimidate a speaker and stifle free speech. They will wrap themselves in the First Amendment - and they will have a legitimate claim. Maybe the Right Wing Noise Machine picks it up and this incident gets elevated (I did find this item on Drudge). Campus Republicans are now looked on as effective campus activists: they got their story in the news. Republicans on campus and on other campuses get energized by this activity. Independents who were leaning Republican start to tilt even more so. Maybe they decided to join the College Republicans or volunteer for a Republican candidate, etc.

They just got stronger. All you did was throw some pie so you could feel good.

This is basically the story David Brock lays out in the early chapters of Blinded by the Right. Its SOP for campus conservatives, and it's all laid out in the campus activism materials distributed by the Young America's Foundation.