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The New Face of College Activism

By Emily Rutherford - Oct 3rd, 2008 at 5:33 pm

It’s frequently said that 21st-century college students aren’t as activist as they were in the good old days, or that networking and the netroots just aren’t the same as a good occupation of an administrative building. There may be some logic to this point, that activism which is less visible to the general public is less likely to get its point across.

However, this week students at Princeton are staging a piece of performance art that, though understated and oh-so-terribly-Princetonian, recalls the publicity of old-school demonstrations. A group led by the Princeton Progressive Nation, Princeton’s left-leaning political magazine (and part of the Campus Progress Publications Network), proposes to teach economics to John McCain. Well, not literally, of course, obviously, but in pointing out that McCain has famously said that “The issue of economics is not something that I’ve understood as well as I should,” the project, organized by Princeton senior James Coan, has established itself in front of the student center this week in order to team-teach Econ 101 to a series of students pretending to be McCain.

The project has attracted itself a modest amount of Princeton-centered publicity, from the The Daily Princetonian and through a website, and the organizers hope that the idea will spread to other campuses.

The issue of university activism in this key election year is an important one, especially given inevitable comparisons to the much-publicized displays of protest at campuses in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This effort at Princeton is interesting because, well, it’s Princeton. Back when the SDS was striking at Columbia, Princeton still hadn’t admitted its first female students. And to this day the school lacks the highly visible progressive element present at many large public universities, or indeed at some of the elite private universities and liberal arts colleges.

But the students trying to teach McCain’s stand-in econ have figured out how to capitalize on a subject near and dear to future investment bankers’ hearts, and that’s as indicative of the new face of progressive activism as anything else. Students with a cause today might not be as loud or as visible, but they’re planning their actions in a much more savvy way. It’s about strategy and planning, finding a target and striking. But the presidential election promises to be the litmus test of whether youth efforts to de-apathize the 18-24 bracket have worked–it will certainly be interesting to see what effect 21st-century teach-ins have on Election Day.

Tags: 2008 presidential election, college, higher ed, John McCain, politics, Princeton, youth activism, youth politics