At the end of last semester, Wesleyan students demonstrated both the most stunning amount of activism in recent years in terms of sheer numbers, and also the most useless. By yelling and accusing and little else, students clearly made their demands known but didn’t go any further. We’ve written about this here before, and said before we were disappointed.
What’s happened since then, and what was happening before then too, is much more promising. Though little has changed on campus—the task force working to bring a multicultural dean to campus being a notable exception—students working on issues outside of campus have done remarkable work. Members of Students Take Action Now: Darfur (STAND) have held awareness events both on and off campus, and are contributing to a national student movement against the genocide in Sudan. The Wesleyan Prisoner Resource and Education Project (WesPREP) is helping to create an official non-profit organization that will continue the work they have done toward improving education in prisons. Students have traveled to Hartford several times to participate in momentous Connecticut events involving the death penalty and gay marriage. Countless other groups are doing their own important work; these are just a few of the organizations on campus making real change on local, national and international levels.
Things have happened this semester, even though the chalk is gone and the forums are over. We encouraged last semester that students stick to the issues brought up in the forum and do the grunt work that it often takes to accomplish anything. A number of the concerns from the forum have been since abandoned, perhaps to be resurrected later. For now, though, students are doing amazing things outside of campus with the same kind of activism Wesleyan has always been known for.
We complained in December that we were being silenced, forgetting how many people all over the world are silenced more than we will ever be. We constantly discuss white privilege and class privilege and educational privilege, but when protesting on-campus issues we rarely recognize that privilege in ourselves. Students who have used their positions of privilege as educated college students to help others who are not are doing more than anyone could with duct tape over their mouths.
It is sad and a little disturbing that it can be more effective to work for issues on a larger scale than on our own campus; thinking globally and acting locally doesn’t seem to be cutting it here anymore. Surely next semester another campus issue will grab everyone’s attention, and maybe we’ll have more success next time. We must always remain self-critical—it wouldn’t be Wesleyan without it—but with only metaphorical duct tape holding us back, there’s no reason for us to let everyone else remain silent.
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