Can you protest about what you don’t know? Are the most knowledgeable among us the ones making a fuss?
Hell no! We won’t go!
Fanatical rallying cry from days gone by? Perhaps the antiquated images of radicals fighting cops in Chicago and SNCC members willingly attacked by dogs and water hoses mark a bygone era.
College activism today is, well…a little less active.
Despite the fact that it may require sacrifices—skipping classes or a meal, shedding the image of innocuous wallflower—America’s youth do not face the dangers of protest that collegiate baby boomers created for themselves in the wake of the civil rights movement.
We no longer see National Guardsmen killing protestors and bystanders; no cops throwing tear gas between classroom buildings.
In fact, following the 1974 tragedy in Kent State, in which four college students lost their lives to overreactions by Army Reservists, protests on college campuses began to take a more peaceful path.
College pacifists have distanced themselves from the ironically violent anti-war protests of their parents as have university pro-life groups from the abortion clinic bombers of the 1990s.
Although rhetoric runs hot in debates about race, equality, LGBTQIQA issues, and war, student groups starting in the 1980s demonstrate a restraint from harming others that shows a learned lesson from the failures and hypocritical actions of the lost generation.
Though individual college students since then have certainly been part of violent displays, these events rarely originated on university campuses.
Yet activism is not dead.
Both the drive to create the White Student Union and concerted efforts to ferret out its originator’s dark side and abort the WSU show the lively fighting spirit of the Georgia State students—without the physical fights.
When they perceive the cause as important enough, Georgia State students will wake up early, make phone calls, hold signs, march, create literature, pass it out, blog and hold forums.
These efforts correspond with a common thread running through protests since the late sixties—the need to feel sacrifice.
While baby boomers resented the “greatest” generation, their biggest resentment may have been that their parents made life too easy for them.
Their progenitors fought against Hitler, the Great Depression, polio and 50-hour work weeks with almost no breaks to provide them with cars, rock and roll, leisure time, college and cash for drugs.
America’s white kids had seen their black brethren risking careers, comfort and even their lives to be able to experience what they inherited by virtue of their pale skins. This was too much guilt for many of them to handle.
Guided by the growing leftist movement, they took on the establishment and some even assumed simple lives away from many creature comforts (except for “grass” and a few acoustic instruments, of course).
Thomas Sowell revealed something interesting about college protestors since the late 1960s, particularly the organizers. The most vocal protestors have had disproportionately low GPAs.
Presumably, they are not bad students because they spend their time protesting; they protest because they believe in a cause and want to make a difference. But Sowell claims they lead protests because they are not good students and want to experience some form of success at their universities. The spotlight gives them that modicum of success.
Rather than do the intellectual legwork of reading and critically engaging the assigned perspectives their establishment professors have chosen, they ignore or lash out against them.
They can justify ditching their assignments because they represent the “oppressive” position, when in reality they are either too lazy to do it or are terrified that perhaps it may make sense and convincingly defend the status quo they reject.
Ignorance is bliss.
And bliss is what most of us strive to achieve. Happiness comes in strange and varied ways to college students. Good grades. Acceptance from peers. Sports. Music. A continuous self-induced haze brought on by drugs, sex and other dopamine highs. The feeling of leadership or participation in something bigger than yourself.
But when you’re wrong you often don’t want to know. You’ve committed yourself. You think your heart cannot be wrong, and anyone who challenges you, even with facts, must be evil.
The problem with activism is that, at its heart, it requires some sort of commitment, which may prove a departure from intellectualism.
But college is for finding out who you are, making mistakes and being willing to learn from them.
It is not about taking a position you find appealing and marrying it forever. It requires intellectual rigor. Being willing to read and learn from people you do not truly know or like and then deciding for yourself.
It is about taking classes from professors you know you will disagree with and learning to embrace a new way of thinking for a semester or two before abandoning or accepting it.
It means earning grade points before you decide to make a point.
