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When College Ends, So Does Activism

Why selling out is a depressingly rational choice for many graduates

By Adam Doster

Jaime Nelson could make anyone feel lazy. Over the past four years, Nelson, an undergraduate activist at the University of Michigan, has led writing workshops with Michigan’s incarcerated, organized voter registration drives to battle the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative in 2006, and united local immigrant rights and labor organizations through the Restaurant Workplace Project, a coalition that sought to expose… return to article

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    Page 1 of 1 pages

    Thanks so much to you writers at In These Times for focusing on an issue as relevant and interesting as the lack of career opportunites for young liberals.  What makes this article even better is that I found this magazine through a Fast Web listing of available jobs, so you guys don’t just complain about young liberals not having enough opportunites to be politically involved, but you actually provide them.  Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouths are; you guys are awesome!!!

    United States Posted by JenniferS on Jun 11, 2007 at 4:27 PM

    Despite the paragraph about class and race diversity, the whining class-based bias of this article is appalling in tone and content. The punch line of this article: for the progressive movement to survive middle-class college educated progressive young people need to coddled with cushy professional salaried jobs (even unions--obstensibly organizations for and by workers. Ugh, why not organize people not as fortunate to go to college to take charge of their own institutions, instead?

    United States Posted by alexandrafuller on Jun 27, 2007 at 10:21 AM

    I’m with Alexandra on the tone of this article.

    Obviously, meaningful activism has to be made available to people who never have the opportunity to go to college.

    And while an effective liberal counter to the right-wing activist grooming machinery might be nice, putting people in paid lobbying or pundit positions is never going to move us toward the radical solutions we need.  (Hint: 15 to 20 percent annual increases in wealth given away to investors would end, one way or another, and that would not go well with the only people capable of funding such an initiative.)

    At the same time, the need to sustain ourselves while organizing for collective action and more power for all people over their own lives is very real and crucial to solve if we’re going to have any hope of building a big enough movement to really change things.

    I quit my day job and helped start the Agaric Design Collective to do web development and ideally time for activism, money to sponsor others, and most importantly the creation of online tools to aid massive organizing.  (As for gainful work for progressives, we’d be happy to talk to hard-working radicals open to the joys of open source code...)

    Back on topic, we do need to sustain proven organizers.  Starting with limited resources, as a matter of biggest bang for the buck it makes sense not to look at college students per se but at workers.

    Imagine what kind of labor activism we might see if workers doing the most organizing could be guaranteed replacement income to become full time organizers if the company fires them in a union-busting effort?

    United States Posted by Benjamin Melançon on Jul 24, 2007 at 7:08 PM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

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