Dude, where is MY revolution?

This blog is going to cover a very specific model of organizing that was implemented to great success by student leaders during the 1990's. Certainly, there were probably other efforts in the past (during the 70's) that were based on this model as well, though so far, I haven't seen any definitive accounts of this.

At any rate, the model that goes something like this:

1. Instead of arguing with administrators on campus, student leaders start their advocacy efforts by organizing a lobbying presence on Beacon Hill. They focuson 'big picture' issues such as the University budget and financial aid.
2. Students support this lobbying by mobilizing some of their grassroots base (ie. parents and other students who are registered to vote). They get them to make phone calls, send emails, post cards or letters at the right time.
3. Students work in coalition with other groups (ie. alumni, staff and faculty unions, and maybe even the administration - assuming that all of these groups can come to a consensus and what to ask for and how to ask for it).
4. Eventually the students influence on Beacon Hill increases, and they use that as leverage to force the administration to negotiate or concede on local issues.

So instead 'crawling' your way up the food-chain of public higher education, you go outside the system and around it - start directly at the top and work down. Why? Because that is how the power in the system flows.

So if you are anything like me, then at this point in our discussion about student empowerment and student activism, you are probably wondering why we are only talking about lobbying and why there hasn't been one single word about protesting. Or rallies? Or demonstrations? Marches? Pickets? Sit-ins? Or how about building take overs? When are we going to talk about building take-overs?

How could we possibly be having a discussion about student activism without automatically including these so called time tested tactics? Or using them as the starting point of the discussion about student power? What about MLK? Ghandi? The Students for a Democratic Society? The anti-war movement? Weren't all of those movements successful and built on protesting. Well, actually - the answer is no they weren't all successful, and no they were not all based on solely on protesting. But that is getting a bit off topic.

Or as one of my good friends likes to say: "dude, where is my revolution?"

I know when I first arrived on campus and got involved, I was under the general impression that student movements and protesting were virtually synonymous. And there were a lot of things and people who reinforced this assumption:

• the main stream media and news organizations;
• historical accounts and documentaries about other student movements (ie. the anti-war movement, the Berkley Free Speech movement, etc.,);
• a substantial and vocal minority of the UMass faculty;
• a substantial and vocal minority of the Student Affairs staff;
• and of course, Amherst being Amherst, a seemingly endless supply of 'professional protesters' (many of whom it seemed hung around UMass but were not even students - at least not at UMass).
  

I should also mention that my first couple of years of being involved did little to dissuade me of this assumption as well. In the Fall of 1989 there were two HUGE events that occurred that were based on the assumption that protesting and direct action were and should be the primary means of mobilizing the student community.

First, in the Fall of 1989 the students of 29 public colleges and universities in Massachusetts staged the largest rally on the Boston Common since the Vietnam War. More than 18,000 students showed up to the rally. Nearly 8,000 of them came from UMass/Amherst alone. How did this happen? That will covered in more depth in a separate posting - but a bried explanation is necessary here. Well, in the weeks preceding the rally, the administration and unions encouraged the faculty and grad ta's to talk about the rally during classes. They used a 'primary' means of communication (always more effective than secondary or tertiary communications like posters or ads) by talking with students in small group settings.

As a result the students came out in droves (a very powerful lesson to be learned there!). The Chancellor actually paid for 80 buses to transport students from Amherst to Boston. So many students showed up that literally thousands of them were turned away. Instead of going back to their dorm rooms and watching tv, they got into their cars and car pooled to Boston.

And while we were there protesting, a group of 300 or so of us gathered inside the state house and actually tried to storm the House floor while it was in session. We were going to stage a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives. We naively believed that the legislators would simply step-aside and allow us to just walk right out on to the House floor. Instead, they rushed the door and engaged in an intense physical struggle to keep us from getting into the chamber. The legislators literally fought us off with their bare hands until the State Police came in and started kicking ass and throwing people around.

It was bedlam. It was craziest thing that I/we - any of us who were there, had ever seen in our lives. Here we were, Generation X - the 'lost' generation, the apathetic generation, the loser generation as the media and baby boomers were more than happy to label us. We had grown up under Ronald Reagan as President, and according to popular lore - we supposedly didn't care about anything. Especially not social activism.

Well, apparently in spite of all the propoganda that tried to convince us that we were 'too conservative' or that we didn't care and that we were 'too apathetic', we managed to pull off the largest protests the state of Massachusetts had seen in decades. And yes, we trampled the flowers on the front lawn of the State House, and the legislators and the Boston Globe and the rest of the media portrayed us as a bunch of rowdy, immature, inarticulate, buffoons, drunks, and morons who came to Boston to party and whatever - like it was one big Mardi Gras event (instead of the most successful grassroot mobilization/ demonstration the state had seen in a generation).

The second huge event occurred just a few weeks later when the students on the Amherst campus followed up that rally with a massive student strike by the undergraduates and graduates on campus. Classes were called off for nearly a week straight. It was crazy. It was unorganized. It collapsed in a fit of infighting, factionalization, finger pointing and accusations of every -ism in the book.

But it was a student strike nonetheless. The first one on campus since Nixon bombed Cambodia in the early 70's (or so I was told at the time). There were literally two thousand students picketing in front of classroom buildings, and no one holding or attending classes.

So if there was all this 'amazing activism' and mobilization that occurred in the 1980's, then here are a few simple questions:

• why the isn't this blog about the 1980's?
• Why hold up the 1990's as some kind of 'Golden Age' of student power when all of this amazing stuff happened at the end of the 1980's?
• Isn't this what student empowerment is all about? Mobilizing people? Getting them out on the streets? Kicking ass, and fighting with the cops?
  

These are good questions, and there is a very simple answer to all of them: none of it worked.

In spite of all the hoopla, energy, excitement, romance, the massive crowds, the rousing speeches, the chants of tens of thousands all at the same time - it was all an utter, and unquestionable failure. Don't get me wrong. It was amazing to watch. It was amazing to be a part of, and to help organize. It also taught us some extremely important lessons (see the posting: Lessons Learned from the Rally and the Strike of 1989)

But it was also, without question, an abysmal failure.

This is not to say that protesting and direct action are automatically a failure. Sometimes direct action works, and often times it doesn't (especially if it is used haphazardly, unplanned, fractured or leaderless). Sure we learned some amazingly important lessons, and sure, many of us were transformed by the events we witnessed and helped organize.

But in the end, none of it worked. The budget cuts came, and they kept coming. And the irony is that in spite of all of the energy and activism on the part of the student body, the Univeristy was incredibly vulnerable and remained so until the student leaders of the 1990's took it upon themselves to empower both themselves and the University.

One of the most important things about these events is that there were is a direct historical connection between the failures and mis-steps of the late 1980's and our successes of the early to mid 1990's. The connection exists because there was a core of us who were determined to learn from these failures. And when I say "us" I am only referring to a group of maybe a dozen or so people, most of whom were SGA officers, Area Gov't Presidents or Committee Chairmen.

We were angry that so much potential energy and activism had been squandered. So, we spent a few years studying and seriously analyzing the problems facing the University - and from those lessons we created a new plan. A plan that we were pretty sure would work. And we made that plan the basis of the newly recreated and reconstituted SCERA.

In 1991-2, we fought to regain control of the SATF from the administration. Then we fought to make sure that SCERA was included in the SGA budget. (Since there was no SCERA staff at the time to testify in front of the SGA Budget Committee, I represented the non-existant agency and laid out for the committee much of the information/model presented here.) We also had to get the administration to approve of the SCERA director's position.

Finally, after months of work, interviews were held and a SCERA director was hired - I think it was the Spring of 93? But I can't remember. I will have to ask some friends.

At any rate, by 1994 and 1995 SCERA was up and running hard. And for the next few years, it laid the ground work for a string of incredibly impressive victories