The Activist

Forty years ago in a social and political climate not unlike our own, Columbia University erupted in student protest. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupied several administrative buildings to protest racial discrimination, the university’s support for the military-industrial complex, and total domination of university governance by corporate administrators. This spark soon ignited a wildfire of protests at other American universities and at universities abroad. Once dismissed as juvenile troublemakers by the political mainstream, SDS and other student activists turned the student movement into a political force to be reckoned with.

Socialists have often been at the forefront of the student movement. The left proposes the simple but apparently radical idea that students and faculty should work together to control the means of education and take university governance back from corporate America. Socialists propose that higher education should not merely involve preparing students to be part of the capitalist machine, but that it should prepare them to be good citizens with a strong and enduring commitment to democracy and equality. These were the ideals of socialist students forty years ago, and these are the ideals of socialist students today. But how far have we really come in realizing these goals, and how far do we still have to go?

The very fact that we’re still fighting the same battles with corporate administrators demonstrates the distance between today’s reality and our ideals. State governments still control our public universities through corporate administrators. The role of student government is mostly advisory. Moreover, corporate America has been successful in turning student government toward an increasingly materialistic agenda. Many now become involved in student government to pad their résumés after graduation, not to bring about real change. While activism and organization are on the rise, apathy and defeatism are still the dominant forces on many campuses.

Take, for example, the situation at this columnist’s own Ohio University and more broadly in the state of Ohio. At Ohio University, corporate administrators routinely ignore the concerns of students and faculty. In recent years they have made unpopular decisions with impunity. They have institued alcohol and drug policies that use students’ own tuition dollars to turn our campus into a virtual police state. They have limited our First Amendment rights by creating Orwellian “free speech zones” in which only registered student organizations can protest in certain areas and at certain times, and they have hailed a slight easing of these still unconstitutional restrictions as an example of a progressive administration that hears student concerns and acts on them. They have made budget decisions that undercut the needs of students and faculty, including a reallocation of funds to hire more corporate bureaucrats at the expense of union custodial and maintenance jobs that were supposed to be protected by a labor contract. For these and other reasons, about 3/4 of voting students and faculty disapprove of our university president, Roderick McDavis. Our corporate Board of Trustees’ response to this disapproval was to limit student and faculty input in the president’s evaluation, give McDavis another five year contract, and grant him an $85,000 per year raise.

Our Student Senate has proven inept and indifferent to most of these problems, but even an activist Student Senate could accomplish little, if anything. Its role is merely advisory. The real power lies with the Board of Trustees, appointed by the Ohio governor to oversee university administration. Two students sit on the Board of Trustees, but their role too is merely advisory. This is essentially how all of Ohio’s public universities are governed, and Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has given no indication that he wants to give students a greater role in decision-making. In fact, Strickland is dragging us down the road to a new bureaucratic nightmare. Dressed up as a program to improve higher education in Ohio, Strickland’s new University System of Ohio will bring Ohio’s universities into bureaucratic uniformity and cut budgets for programs that are deemed “under-performing.” In other words, look for increased funding for mathematics, natural sciences, and applied sciences coupled with body blows to the arts, humanities, and most social sciences.

The situation in Ohio is just an example of what’s going on nationwide. Corporate America is doing everything it can to see that there is no next generation of artists, musicians, authors, and philosophers — no new agents of morality and progress. This is because corporate America knows that, unencumbered by these moral restraints, the next generation of engineers, computer technicians, chemists, physicists, and biologists it is seeking to create will have no qualms about building new weapons of mass destruction. It knows that without agents of morality and progress the next generation of accountants, economists, and corporate lawyers will secure unregulated capitalism for decades to come. And what about that military-industrial complex that our forebears railed against? It’s alive and well at our universities. The federal government has now inextricably tied recruitment access to educational funding.

Now more than ever before, we need an organized student movement united around the principle that students and faculty must cooperate to seize control of the means of education and drive corporate America and the military-industrial complex out of our lecture halls and administrative buildings. Now more than ever, we need a new generation of student leaders who can shake off the malaise and defeatism and get us organized. We need marches, strikes, sit-ins, and complete university shut-downs. We need to bring the corporate university system to a grinding halt and demand its complete, non-negotiable reform on our own terms. We need another 1968 Revolution. We can do this, and we must do this before the transformation of American higher education into a recruiting tool for corporations and the military-industrial complex is complete and irrevocable. Forty years later, our universities are long overdue for another uprising.