Nuance is not a Vice
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
The University of Apathy
It has occurred to me with some finality that students at the University of Virginia (and, perhaps, colleges nationwide) do not care about the institution as anything more than a means to an end. I don't think it has always been this way, and nor do I believe it an indictment of the student body et al; rather, it simply raises the question of Why? Why is there so much apathy amongst our generation, and Why is there a permeating idea that every stage of life is simply a conduit to the next stage?
This conundrum is a subtle one, for it must be couched in terms of what outwardly appears to be a thriving culture of student involvement. UVA has over five hundred registered student groups, ranging from the Black Student Alliance to the Stained Glass Club to the Albemarle County Foosball Association. Moreover, one of the hallmarks of the school which tour guides tout is student self-governance. A Student Council which divies up over $500,000 yearly; totally student-run honor and judicial systems; Fraternities who have achieved the status of corporation.
Brief anecdote: My boss over the summer went to Iraq to help negotiate for the new embassy in Baghdad. Without getting into details, the Iraqis wanted the U.S. out of the palace we're currently using in less time than we were able to leave. The Iraqis suggested we temporarily relocate to an adjacent palace which was unoccupied. My boss invited the Iraqi negotiators to tour the suggested palace; while it looked pristine from the outside, inside it had been bombed to absolute hell.
Student self-governance - and, indeed, the entire idea of student involvement - is that bombed-out palace. At this point, the administration looks to student groups as little more than rubber stamp bodies. I wrote in my column on September 7th, "Little will change this dynamic except an institutional decision by the administration to discover true student concerns and give them primacy. The students can offer no incentives and no threats; our hand is so weak we don't even have cards to hold."
I'm no longer sure that the administration is entirely to blame. Back in the 1970s, Student Council got O'Hill built. They got a dining hall built! Council was also responsible for Clemons Library, among other lasting initiatives. Why did Council used to be so strong? Why, when the May Day riots hit UVA, was the President of the University huddled in Carr's Hill with none other than the Student Council President?
The answer lies in the legitimacy of student self-governance as manifested by the students themselves. Council 30 years ago - and the Frats 30 years ago, and the honor system 30 years ago - had the backing of the majority of students. If they needed to, Council could get a thousand students onto the Lawn protesting and making a huge public relations mess for the University. The last Council-organized protest was a few years ago under Abby Fifer; it drew about fifty. The idea that in the mid-80s the administration could get away with stripping Frats of fall rush would have been laughable; they were engaged in a contentious battle just trying to get rid of Easters. Nowadays, IFC presidents have abandoned even an attempt at restoring fall rush. The honor system has survived nearly untouched for over 150 years; last year, the Faculty Senate came perilously close to voting to boycott honor, which would have been a crippling blow. As it stands, the single sanction is teetering on the brink and should fall within the next year or two, paving the way for the eventual dilution of honor into a UJC-like body.
Without getting into a litany on the failures of other student groups to successfully advocate for their positions, let's just say that if the four pre-eminent institutions of student involvement are decrepit, the state of the CIO is not strong.
There are a few hypotheses which can be offered for this phenomenon. The skeptic would say that the administration has simply become tyrannical, and they have always held the ultimate power. The cynic might offer that our generation is inherently less activist than our predecessors; after all, we can hardly be bothered to vote. The realist could suggest that our peers have a more acute understanding of where college fits in the grand scheme of life, and we're not about to work ourselves into a lather and do something harmful to our careers.
I tend to think it's a blend of all three, but not just the cop-out "enlightened answer" of mix them all together and come up with the solution. Rather, there is a causal chain here - for example, the administration has grown bolder in their unilateralism because students are raising less of a fuss about it. Students care less because the culture and message is that college is for having fun and getting a job afterwards.
I worry for our generation because we have no sense of civic purpose. There is a pervading sense that everything is pretty good, and we shouldn't fix what ain't broke. This complacency can be seen everywhere; it can be seen in the low turnout at student elections, in the refusal to make a concerted outcry over even the most outrageous administration policies (stripping upperclassmen of housing privilege without consulting anyone or flat-out dragging their feet on committing funds to fix the safety light situation come to mind), and it can be seen in the fact that I wrote a column calling for the end of single sanction, and not a single person responded.
Here's the best thing the honor system has going for it: no one who isn't involved cares what happens.
We are at college to grow as people. More than anything else, that maturity may be the most important thing any of us learn in our four years here. But what are we teaching when everyone is so disconnected from the community? When you standing in Scott Stadium roaring the Good Ol' Song, you feel a deep sense of connection with everyone in the Orange and Blue; yet, when Student Council speaks, it speaks with the voice of 30, not 16,000. Something has slipped, a breakdown in horizontal linkages which once made the University a tight-knit group who could advocate for social change or housekeeping change.
When in the "real world" and faced with "real issues," can we expect the response from our generation to be any different? What about when, instead of printing costs, it's tax costs? And when instead of a lack of safety lights, it's a lack of police? What happens when the government stops responding to the people? Do we then figure, "things are going pretty well, I'm in a job which is to get me to retirement, and I don't want to jeopardize that"?
I wouldn't pretend to say that this is a shockingly new trend; indeed, young people have never voted in droves, and their power never ran unchecked -- note that we don't have Easters anymore. Nonetheless, the fact remains that today students do little more than put face time in at organizations which they enjoy and look good on a resume. The minority of student leaders, those who pour their lives into one cause or another, often look up and find a half-dozen people sitting uncomfortably in a room prepared for a hundred.
What I’m getting at is this: mask it how you will, but UVA has a civically undereducated, apathetic student body, and that is the primary cause behind the downfall of both successful student advocacy and successful student groups. I imagine this is not isolated to Charlottesville.
I don't have the answers yet, though my next post will offer some basic suggestions. What do you all think? I honestly don't know how to successfully address the fundamental issues.
Let me end with an aphorism: By fixating on the horizon, we forget to watch where we're going.
--Elliot
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Mr. Badnarik and Me
I'm going to reproduce an email I sent to an old friend at GMU, because I think there are points which should be made public:
"So today, I got to spend an hour debating with Michael Badnarik, the libertarian candidate for president. You would’ve loved it. A few fellow Cavalier Daily (the school newspaper where I’m an associate opinion editor) and a couple other students were standing around talking to him, and I got to essentially go at it with him for a good long time. It was pretty fascinating – I really liked to atmosphere of a serious politician taking the time to intellectually discuss the real issues with mere college students.
As for Badnarik himself…well, let’s just say that he thinks the solution to terrorism is to give everyone a gun, and the income tax needs to go, since the government will do just fine without 20% of its budget. He presented his case forcefully and with a lot of backing, but we ultimately hit an ideological impasse; he thinks taxation is theft and that government cannot do anything better than the free market, I think that taxation is part of the social contract and that government is the only thing that stops the cold, harsh market from plaguing a large portion of society into dire straits. We talked about a range of issues from gun control to the war in Iraq to education to the role of the constitution.
I think I held my own quite nicely, though he certainly didn’t give any ground or pull any punches. I walk away from that experience quite convinced libertarianism works well on paper but is largely impractical in the real world, and I walk away convinced that third parties need to be included far more in the political process. We talked about REAL issues, not military records from 40 years ago; we raised points of educated discourse and philosophy and had an actual discussion that provoked the mind. Those type of conversations should be happened throughout the nation, but they’re not. Instead of civic debate, we have vitriolic, substance-less rhetoric full of more bile than policy. There isn’t an individual in this country who couldn’t benefit from an hour-long conversation like the one I had.
I’ve been doing some voter registration down here, and it’s encouraging how much people seem to care. I just hope someone comes along that has a chance to win who says these things. If no one does, I’m going to have to do it myself."
You can find more discussion of the Badnarik reception (and a more in-depth account) over at http://www.newsthoughts.net
