This June, the popular North American socialist magazine Jacobin published an article by Freddie deBoer titled “Student Activism Isn’t Enough: Eight reasons why universities can’t be the primary site of left organizing.” Among them, he lists four-year student turnover, priority of academic work, and incompatibility of growing as an activist with running an essential site of organizing.
He’s not incorrect—the conditions he cites routinely curb our progress. As activists, we fight our classmates as well as ourselves to make headway on Princeton-centered causes. Our deficiencies affirm that we couldn’t shoulder a movement for—and under the watch of—the world. DeBoer emphasizes that his article holds “empirical claims, not normative ones,” and that he is “not saying it would be good or bad for campus to be the key site of a given movement’s organizing strategy.”
Yet colleges are even still more complicated than their logistical setup, and in fact the normative argument that he avoids here is the important one: even if it were possible, a campus-grown left would be destructive to pursue.
Since the anti-monarchists sat to one side of their representative during the French revolutionary parliament in 1789, the political “left” has been defined by egalitarian ends. It champions a just distribution of provisions for survival and for dignity, and in turn, freedom to those whom the political structure disadvantages. It elevates workers because they are oppressed through their exclusion from these provisions, and often face identity-based subjugation as well. Yet it would be false to assume that addressing class conflict will at once dismantle all other unjust hierarchies. Rather, the focus is utilitarian: when unified, workers hold the decisive power to deliver (or not) the material and financial goods that maintain the existing societal order. In those ways they are the beneficiaries of, and also the means for creating this equitable and freer world.
The “working class” is increasingly difficult to outline, but academia does retain a sliver of it—adjunct professors and graduate students research and the latter often have contractual teaching obligations; while financial hardship and aid packages force undergraduates into on- and off-campus jobs that invoke the union struggles of any wage labor position. Nevertheless, a school’s institutional character does not change with the identities of the former’s transient population; student workers cannot confer their own duality onto their schools. There is a fixed societal purpose in the networks, physical space, and finances of elite colleges. Using these as a means is not an equivalent of seeking out or building up an infrastructure free of their baggage.
Can we accept dissonance between institutional goals and those of our movement, if campuses can provide the resources we sorely need? Certainly, students at Kent State University, Berkeley, and even Princeton demonstrated passionately against the Vietnam War, and exerted a significant influence on public opinion. But while some of the outrage was moral, students were nonetheless targets of the draft. We can’t count on them to act so decisively on issues outside of their immediate self-interest. University communities should and undoubtedly will continue to take up fights for progressive reforms, but we can’t pretend that those targeted campaigns represent a comprehensive movement. They are branches, but not the underlying bedrock of the left’s reason for being. We would be unable to reach problems at their roots if we were to sow ourselves in academia.
This is because the left chases a paradoxical aim, one that resembles inventing a color: imagine liberation while our relationships, our instincts, the terms through which we understand the world, are products of the system that necessitates the task. Forging a route that escapes this lens requires exceptionally self-aware and careful methodology, and the strategic direction of a university-led left would be inseparable from the class position of its institution. Instead, the best shot is with the people who know the issues intimately, will inherit the changes, and hold the leverage we will need for closing the distance.
The way forward, then, is clear: to pursue this better world, acting from within Princeton or any venue of its status, we can align our activism with the impetus of the working class. The campus left has a place; not because of the media attention it receives, but because theory is hand-in-hand with practical organizing, adamantly visionary through the failures and periods of stagnation that come with progress. As this start of this school year finds us in a radically different political consciousness than the last, we can begin it with a commitment to working with, as opposed to independently of communities right outside our iron gates and the workers with whom we coexist inside. In doing so we can mirror the alliance that the left needs to build universally, the one that can both create, and refuse to settle. It’s fortunate that deBoer is correct in his practical diagnosis, because those who are tempted by opportunity won’t get very far. But when our strategy is only as deep as the next easiest step, we dismiss our dream and we likely fail our people.
Academia is fraught, but learning is selfless and communal. When we bring those values to the struggle, we fulfill our highest purpose.
Be First to Comment