To familiarize students with the toolbox of social change, we can explore ways they can reach out on issues they care about, build broad coalitions, tell the story of the causes they embrace in a ways that will resonate beyond the already converted (think of the gay rights movement for a successful example). More than anything, we can encourage them to persist in working for what they believe, whatever the inevitable setbacks. They'd do well to heed the conclusions of Meredith Segal, a young woman who founded Students for Obama on Facebook, grew it to 150,000 members, and then co-chaired the national student campaign from her Bowdoin dorm room. "Your candidate gets elected," she said, "Obama or anyone else. People think, 'Here's their platform, here are their policies. They'll magically become law.' But that's never the way things change. You have to keep pushing. You have to keep working. You have to keep building that engaged community. You can never expect any elected official to do it all on their own, no matter how much you admire them or how hard you worked to help them win. Your election night victory is just the beginning of the process."
Historical examples can also offer powerful context. Think of the relationship of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to the civil rights movement. They were personally sympathetic but held the movement at arm's length for fear of shattering the Democratic coalition, in which Southern segregationist whites played a major role. Johnson even opposed the seating of an integrated Mississippi delegation that challenged the official all-white one at the 1964 Democratic convention. Yet civil rights activists persisted and created a political and moral force so strong that it expanded the horizon of the possible. Johnson ended up investing all his political skill and capital to pass the civil rights and voting rights bills, even though he knew the likely costs to his party--and predicted, accurately, that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation or more. Since Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, was a staunch opponent of these laws, he would never have signed them, much less actively pressed for them. It took both the right political leader and a movement systematically pushing them.
For a recent example, think of the Tea Party. They began (before they took the Tea Party name) by showing up at Town Hall meetings on Obama's health care bill, publically speaking out while most of Obama's supporters did little beyond signing online petitions or emails. They organized through friends, colleagues and online networks. They aggressively recruited candidates and volunteered to get out the vote, sweeping state and Federal offices in 2010. They obviously received a boost from financial backers like the Koch Brothers, and from conservative media. But without ordinary citizens acting in a way that combined electoral and non-electoral involvement, they would never have made an impact. And they've clearly succeeded in changing contemporary American politics.
From a different political perspective, the Occupy movement similarly shifted initial public debate. Discussion of income inequality and unemployment rose dramatically in the major media in response to the (mostly young) people rallying in New York's Zuccotti Park and similar public spaces throughout the country, targeting financial institutions they considered responsible for widening America's economic divides. The movement influenced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to reverse his initial opposition to renewing the state's "millionaire's tax," and the Los Angeles City Council to pass a "responsible banking" ordinance that requires banks doing business with the city to disclose detailed data about local lending practices. The movement highlighted our distribution of wealth in a way that liberal economists had been trying and failing to do for decades. And many students still seem passionately interested in what's happened with it. But because Occupy has been so adamantly non-electoral in its approach, and often ambivalent about coalitions with allies like unions, its impact on political policies and choices has so far been muted.
BEYOND THE PERFECT STANDARD
When students resist electoral participation, it's often from a sense that the sphere has become so corrupted, particularly by money, that it will in turn corrupt them to participate. They fear that it will undermine their authenticity and leave them craven and corrupt, like the Wesleyan student's fear of becoming just "a politician." This fits the narrative that Paul's Soul of a Citizen book calls "the perfect standard," where people decide that they can't dare act for change unless they know every relevant seventeenth decimal statistic, are as eloquent as Martin Luther King and as saintly as Gandhi, and find the perfect cause and moment to act in their lives. When applied to political candidates or leaders, this standard demands a consistency difficult to match, because whatever candidates' strengths or flaws, they'll inevitably disappoint us with some of their compromises or stands. The question is whether students will participate in choosing our elected leaders despite their reservations, or withdraw and let them be selected by others, including those very wealthy contributors whose undue influence so many of the students bemoan.
We can even encourage students to volunteer in campaigns despite mixed feelings, suggesting they make phone calls and knock on doors for their preferred candidates even if they don't agree with their every stand. In fact, voicing their ambivalence while making clear the stakes may even give them more credibility, given how much of the population shares their doubts. On the practical side, we can give them academic credit for doing this, accompanied by whatever reflective follow-up we assign or negotiate.
Our challenge is to make our classrooms and campuses venues for thoughtful debate, reflection, and discussion, bending over backwards to ensure students of all political perspectives feel welcomed. To emphasize this last point, if we're politically liberal and just a single student of ours is conservative, or vice versa, they need to feel encouraged--even if we have to go out of our way to help connect them with ways to participate consistent with their values. This election will affect students profoundly, as will future ones, so we need to model a climate where they recognize the stakes, argue the issues, yet respect those with differing opinions, refusing to cavalierly demonize them. The more we can do this, the more we can chip away at the toxic political culture of our time.
If students are politically disappointed, and many are, we might do well to stress the words of Czech dissident (and eventual president) Vaclav Havel, "Hope is not a prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart." Or as Jim Wallis of Sojourners puts it, "Hope is believing despite the evidence and then watching the evidence change." That means hope can never be the property of a particular political leader, party, or campaign, though candidates can certainly tap into it. Rather, it resides in the actions of ordinary citizens, including, but not limited to showing up at the polls to exert what influence they can. We'd do well to use the podium of our classrooms to encourage student idealism, whatever its political direction, including when it breaches the boundaries of what's deemed politically possible. We can emphasize that those we elect will make immensely consequential choices in our common name, and that whatever the political visions our students embrace, they're most likely to achieve them by actively supporting the candidates closest to their stands, rather than withdrawing from the fray and allowing those whose values they most oppose to be elected by default. In other words, they can challenge the degradation of our politics without withdrawing from the process, or holding those who nonetheless participate to an impossibly perfect standard. As Meredith Segal stressed, working for change requires using all available tools, and taking advantage of every key moment to move toward the political goals they believe in.
Paul Rogat Loeb is founder and Executive Director of the Campus Election Engagement Project, a nonpartisan effort to get students engaged on America's campuses, and author of Soul of a Citizen and The Impossible Will Take a Little While. Alexander Astin founded UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute and is the Campus Election Engagement Project Advisory Board Chair. Parker J. Palmer is founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage & Renewal, and author of Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.
Cross-posted from InsideHigherEd.com, where this essay originally appeared
http://www.insidehighered.com/
RESOURCES FOR ENGAGEMENT
How do we help students register and turn out at the polls despite challenging new voter registration and ID laws and other practical barriers? How do we help them research and debate candidate positions, debunk false campaign ads and rhetoric, and make informed decisions in their choices. The nonpartisan Campus Election Engagement Project works to help faculty, administrators, and staff involve their students in the election, offering checklists and other resources to help them register, volunteer, learn about the issues, and turn out at the polls. In terms of ads and candidate stands, faculty can also refer people to respected nonpartisan websites like www.Factcheck.org and www.Flackcheck.org, from University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, or other respected sites like www.Politifact.com. WWW.Votesmart.org lets students match their preferences on key issues with political candidates (though we find its "courage"/"lacks courage" distinctions based on questionnaire responses quite simplistic). Campus Election Engagement Project will also soon be distributing non-partisan voter guides, like those of RockTheVote and the state League of Women Voters affiliates. Faculty can sign up to be notified and to connect with others working to engage at their schools at www.campusvotemap.info. We can also use the available resources to help students engage their friends and classmates, reaching out directly and electronically to ensure they have required identification documents, register in time, are educated on the issues, and get to the polls. There's even a free downloadable SmartPhone app that helps them do this electronically. For some context on the new voter ID laws and campuses see this useful summary.
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