Maxwell Love has an interesting post up over at The SGA Blog on student power and the role of national student organizations. It’s an intro post, a starting point for a longer discussion, and I’m eager to see where he goes with it.

Love gives my dissertation a welcome shout-out, in the context of discussing the concessions campus administrators made to student activists in the late sixties and the seventies. But there’s a chunk of his argument that I’d disagree with, or at least complicate.

He writes that when administrators “made concessions to allow students some ‘power’ to assume governing roles in their institutions, a step backward in the formulation of real student power was made,” because

Administrations realized that if they gave the majority of students some right in determining appropriate college conduct, and encouraged them to think they did have real power, they could easily squash any dissent or disorderly students quicker than with ironclad rules. But please my peers; let’s not buy these bribes and illusions of power.

It’s true that campus administrators did — and do — seek to co-opt  student movements for the transformation of higher ed by granting concessions that don’t alter the fundamental relations of power in the institutions. But that doesn’t mean that a student judiciary can’t be a useful check on administration overreach, that a student seat on a faculty senate is worthless, or that there’s no benefit to a student government in moving from being slightly less to slightly more autonomous.

Incremental change may be significant change, and it may lay the groundwork for additional change in the future. It may also, of course, be meaningless “reform” that has the effect of deflating student protest. Figuring out which is which — and then communicating that distinction effectively to the campus — is a huge and crucial challenge for any student activist campaign.