From MIM Notes 132, February 15, 1997
This is a general article about the need for progressive-minded students to demand that administrators stay out of their non-classroom life. While we think that students should control curriculum too, there is even less justification for administrators to tell students what they can and can't read in their spare time, so we're focusing on this at the moment.
Though the concrete examples are from UMass Amherst the concepts are widely applicable. We welcome contributions from students and partisans at other institutions, and would especially like to meet with UMass student leaders to discuss how to launch a campaign to defend the "voice" of the student population.
The autonomy that college students can exert over their education, or even their leisure time is under attack in Amerika. As recent events at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and other schools illustrate, the hard won gains of the 1960s are almost gone. Administrators are cracking down on the "freedoms" given to students, and have often successfully won student body and student leader complicity in these actions.
This trend is problematic for revolutionary organizing. It impedes access to a population that has historically played key organizing roles in the early stages of revolution. It also decreases the influence that radicalized and revolutionary students can have over other students.
Despite the fact that Amerikan college students are disproportionately of the oppressor nation, the age contradiction and their unique social circumstances make white students a population to work closely with. Students have more of an interest in change, leisure time to study the best path forward and learn the facts and can provide funds and resources to progressive causes.
While white nation youth have an interest in settler parasitism, their age can separate them from the rest of the white settler nation. Within the white nation, youth have the greatest material interest in overthrowing the system. The aren't as tied into the system as their parents and they have much longer to live, so they would benefit much more from a world without patriarchy or environmental destruction.
In the 1960s, college administrators were not as powerful as they are today. Faculty and student organizations held comparatively more power in determining issues of curriculum and student life. In the late 1960s, the campuses were a hot bed of activism, with students providing concrete support to the Black Panther Party, opposing the Vietnam War and forming their own revolutionary organizations. Berkeley students who wished to distribute anti-Jim Crow literature were prevented from setting up a literature table in the main area of the campus. In organizing the Free Speech Movement, students won this privilege and continued to build organizations with increasingly radical politics.
Since the 1970s, administrators have been scheming to depoliticize campuses by restricting independent initiative and replacing it with corporate culture. The administrators have an upperhand in the present-day battle because material conditions are different. In the 1960s, self-interest in avoiding the draft was a significant impetus for organizing. Now, there are fewer reasons to be a revolutionary from an oppressor background.
In the early 1970s, one million college students told a major magazine they considered themselves revolutionaries. While such a survey would find a much smaller number today, administrators recognize the volatility of student populations and do their best to impede independent organizing.
First came administrative offices designed to "help" students organize. These Student Activity Offices (SAOs) gave student access to a small amount of University funds, but heaped on requirements for organizing including requirements that all monies go through the University. The problem with this is the incredible bureaucracy created to spend that money, or requirements that meetings be held with inaccessible advisors before holding a large event. The students who call SAOs "Strangling Activities Office" have the right perspective. The Free Speech Movement opened the floodgates of a revolutionary tide by giving a forum for revolutionary ideas. Now, administrators are slowly turning off the taps.
RAIL comrades regularly travel to distribute newspapers in First Nation territory and on college campuses. Comrades have seen that already inadequate space for literature on campuses is disappearing. In the last few years, many campuses have removed racks that could be used for any type of literature, leaving only space for daily student newspapers, the sex-funded non-student weeklies (Advocate, Village Voice) and the spring break/credit card literature. Infrequent or monthly newspapers are less and less welcome.
More nefariously, RAIL has found that newspaper rack removal increases in times of student unrest. For example, during large battles in New York City against budget cuts, or during anti-racist struggles on other campuses, the literature racks disappear.
On a similar theme, postering is under attack by administrators and a few student lackeys. Postering is a cheap, timely way to inform thousands of people about an event or idea. Overall, more and more campuses are enforcing rules that postering be restricted to "approved surfaces", with these approved surfaces becoming smaller and smaller over time. A related phenomenon is that of requiring that posters be approved be a bureaucrat, or some other overpaid bureaucrat will rip them down.
During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, where the government represented the majority of the people, walls were filled with big character posters denouncing top Party leaders and reactionary college leaders. When walls were filled, the reed mats were erected in the streets to hold the views of the students.
The Amerikan college population is largely content with a passive acceptance of their decadence. However it's a sign of student potential that that the administrators try so hard to restrict what the students have access to. Recently, MIM Notes reported on the Swarthmore librarian who told MIM that students had better things to do than read newspapers. Mass RAIL often writes about the New Students Program that asks us to stay away from the incoming students because they are so "impressionable".
RAIL believes that 18-22 year old student can make political decisions for themselves. Readers familiar with the film "Battle Of Algiers" will remember the scene in which a seven year old boy risks death to steal the megaphone of a French Colonialist soldier to denounce French imperialism. The adults were cowed by French armed might, but this young person risked his life to encourage the adults to rise up. If a child can make this decision, or if younger Palestinian children can hurl stones at Israeli soldiers during the Intifada, students three times older can certainly decide upon a balance between math homework and struggling over revolution.
A particularly dangerous phenomenon is the administration movement to build up lackeys that appear to be students-serving-students but are actually traitors to student power. The administrations first seized upon this idea after the successful struggles by oppressed nations students to establish cultural centers on the campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These cultural centers eventually got full time bureaucrat staff members and the funds to hire many students. These cultural centers, along with their counterparts, the oppressed national studies departments, were the product of revolutionary struggle. But just as Department of Black Studies professors owe their jobs to the bureaucracy, the cultural centers are forcibly detached from the political movements that spawned them. The only political struggle that remains from within the cultural center movements is the struggle to maintain or expand the dependent finical relationship on the college's white bureaucracy.
When students or staff of these cultural centers go beyond a de-politicized culture and lend support to political activity in defense of their nation, they come under considerable pressure to drop it in favor of sanitized dissent like Jocyln Elders of Lani Gunier. Student government institutions have the potential to lead broad-based pro-student struggles, but are often a haven for compradors.
At UMass, the Campus Center/Student Union Commission (CCSUC) is a subset of the student government and is responsible for policy within the buildings of the same name. In 1995, the CCSUC attempted to regulate postering within the Complex, but this power grab failed when they realized that they didn't have the funds necessary to pay themselves enough to do the job.
RAIL would imagine the CCSUC is pushing for more funds so as to implement this proposal again. One sign that a student policy organization isn't representing students is when it isn't clear (to administration, the students or the student policy org) who is n control.
In 1995, some bulletin boards were removed from within the CCSU Complex, and the CCSUC told a RAIL comrade that the CCSUC wanted the boards put back. If the CCSUC was really in charge and not just playing king of the dung heap, they could have ordered the boards replaced.
In 1996 the record of the CCSUC was mixed. The only thing that was clear is that such power puppets only will serve students when their is a bottom up pressure to counter that of the administration. When the CCSUC told a group supportive of RAIL that they couldn't table in the summer because the policy was "no tabling" (with the unwritten part saying "unless you are a big bank or the police) these comrades took the cause to streets, gathering hundreds of signatures, including from the political volatile parents of incoming students.
The comrades were allowed to table, but Vending Coordinator Esther Salas' promise in July of an announcement of a new formal, pro-student policy, has gone unfulfilled. Likewise when an adult administrator named Charley was ripping down RAIL posters because they were "too many" and "offensive", and when Charley credited the CCSUC with this "policy", the CCSUC responded to a widely distributed open letter by telling Charley to back off.
The CCSUC is not cured off its lackey nature yet, though. The more difficult issue of the removal of half the bulletin boards is still unresolved. In the summer of 1996, the Department of Environmental Health and Safety allegedly told the CCSUC that so much bulletin board in a long hallway was a fire hazard. Like a good puppet, the CCSUC had the bulletin boards taken down, but didn't have them put up anywhere else. Suspicious of this, a RAIL supporter asked the CCSUC for proof that this is a true fire hazard. The supporter asked for documentation of this fire code or study. The supporter and RAIL don't think this documentation exists. If this documentation does exist, it doesn't change the fact that the CCSUC accepted this analysis without question, nor does it change the subjective nature of this ruling.
In an open letter to the CCSUC in October, the CCSUC was asked to get this documentation from EH&S. Since then Esther Salas told RAIL that the individual in question at EH&S works odd hours and is difficult to get in touch with. It's ironic at best that the CCSUC and the EH&S person had no problem getting in touch to get the boards taken down, but now that the pressure is on, the individual is unreachable.
Twenty and thirty years ago, revolutionary and radical students organized solidarity organizations under the leadership of liberation movements, and also firmly controlled their student governments. Now, radical student groups are weak if they still exist, and the power of student governments is mostly symbolic or inconsequential.
At this time, RAIL sees it as most effective for revolutionaries within the student governments to get out of these organizations and dedicate themselves to more revolutionary work. There are enough liberals who can be radicalized through a combination of pressure from revolutionaries and the simple act of the revolutionary stepping out of the way. This also removes the revolutionary from getting bogged down in liberal, tactical details and frees the revolutionary to do work that only a revolutionary will do.
The radicalization of students requires that student independence be defended and expanded. It has been RAIL's experience that the exposure of this college administrator plot and of student complicity in it has been successful at making some important changes. Hopefully this article will take us several big steps forward in that regard.