Monday, March 1, 2010
Conversation with sources
While i was rereading my paper i realized that my topic was still a bit everywhere. I wanted to tie in real world protest and college protest, but after reviewing my sources i have found that most of them are not really supportive of my research topic. I have rearranged my list of sources and now i feel that i can go on with my topic but in a new way. I want to tie in activism and protest here on the rutgers campus. I'm not sure exactly how i am going to do this, but i definately want to incorporate our campuses protest history with possibly what causes the actual protests. Do the outside factors such as war and politics have a large affect on the act of protesting on campuses? What has triggered past protests here on campus? How has that changed over time?
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I think it would be a very good project to look into the history of protest at Rutgers. Just from what I know and have lived through, there is a long history with a wide variety of causes. I was a student here during the 80s anti-Apartheid rally in front of the Rutgers Student Center, where I spent one night in a tent with a number of other Targum reporters and got to speak with Sister Souljah. In the early 1990s, when I began grad school here, I had an undergraduate girlfriend who was part of the circle of students who took over Milledoler Hall for a couple of weeks to protest tuition increases and the English Department's refusal to grant tenure to world famous poet Amiri Baraka (who went on to justify that decision when, as Poet Laureate of NJ, he wrote a poem blaming the Jews for 9/11 and was promptly de-Laureated by the legislature). And I have met several students involved in the anti-War march that shut down Route 18 a couple years ago, leading to the arrest of "the Rutgers three."
ReplyDeleteOne thing I have observed is that in most cases where student protests escalate to the point where they get significant media coverage is that there is always some larger social issue that inflames passions - such as Apartheid or the War in Iraq. In the 60s it was the Civil Rights movement (Mario Savio and others at Berkeley were at first protesting the refusal of the school to grant funds to student organizations supporting the Civil Rights movement). The Milledoler sit-in during the 90s was really something of an anomaly because there was really no larger issue to inflame passions, which is why it was such a peaceful and almost forgettable incident -- even though it was allowed to go on for quite a while. It was really about tuition (which at that time was just over $2,000 so it is almost laughable that people were protesting) and students wanted representation on the Board of Governors to help contest tuition increases in the future. There really was no larger issue troubling the nation or inflaming student passions. Amiri Baraka, however, tried to hijack the demonstration to serve his own ends (of trying to gain tenure), even visiting the protesters (some of whom had taken his class) and getting them to march down College Ave to the former house (since razed) that stood in front of Alexander Library and housed Richard Poirier's office and the offices of The Raritan (a prestigious English lit journal that he had founded and edited). I was actually taking Poirier's graduate Emerson seminar in that building when campus police came in to offer us protection as the protesters (quite a large group -- possibly 75-100) surrounded the building for at least 30 minutes of slogan shouting because Poirier was widely seen (quite accurately, by his own admission to us during that protest) as the main force behind denying Baraka tenure. Baraka tried to make it about race. The truth is it was about prejudice of another kind: against creative writers or rabble rousers as opposed to "scholars" or true academics (in Poirier's view). In a sense, Baraka introduced some inflammatory issues into the protest to try to raise it up, but once his denial of tenure was affirmed that just died on its own.
ReplyDeleteHope that brief history helps. I left out Tent City, which is all about tuition really and funding - though during the Darfur issue it got a little more inflamed.
So I would say funding issues get students to protest, but it takes some larger issue to turn it into a full-blown Strike or March or student action. It's sort of like the difference between a storm and a tornado: a storm just has the energy of the storm itself to sustain it, but a tornado usually has the Jet Stream overhead and a clash of warm Gulf air and cool mountain air all coming together to create perfect tornado conditions. The same is true of protests. Without a war or terrible Civil Rights issues to inflame passions, the movement does not go very far. It does not have enough energy to sustain itself on the local issue alone. It needs some larger social injustice or problem to provide sufficient energy to galvanize students.