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“A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.” –Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
(via Cambridge Common)
I’m currently reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, on organizing in the age of the internet. He doesn’t have a huge amount to say about campus activism specifically, but a lot of his general insights are relevant to the student experience, and his understanding of organizing connects up with mine in interesting ways. Once I’m done, I’ll likely post a review, or at least some thoughts.
For now, here’s a quote:
The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented, and however minor they may seem, any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. … We adopt those tools that amplify our capabilities, and we modify our tools to improve that amplification.
Speaking of social tools, have I mentioned that this blog has a Facebook group? Not quite sure what we’re going to use it for yet, but you’re welcome to join if you’re interested in finding out, or in helping us decide.
“We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other.”
–Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s.”
As I noted yesterday, three anti-sweatshop sit-ins have ended in arrests in the last week, but the Chancellor of UNC, where the most recent protest is still ongoing, is taking a different tack, at least for now. When he left his office yesterday evening, he went so far as to clap along with the chanting protesters, and wish them a “nice weekend.”
The Charlotte Observer has made an interesting response to the UNC protest — on Friday it posted an extended excerpt from the US Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision on its website. Tinker overturned a local school district’s ban on the wearing of black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, and is, as the paper notes, one of the court’s most important students’ rights rulings.
Here’s a quote from the Tinker ruling, snipped from the excerpt posted at the Charlotte Observer site:
In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school as well as out of school are “persons” under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved.
The full text of the Tinker decision and an audio file of the oral argument in the case can be found here.
studentactivism.net 
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