According to conventional wisdom, students have a long and noble tradition of getting rowdy in the name of one cause or another. Conventional wisdom would also have us believe that this tradition is now as dead as a dodo. Examine things more closely though, and you’ll see that campus militancy hasn’t died out – you just have to know where to look for it.
‘60s sentimentalists have a lot to answer for. The bastards have monopolised the nostalgia industry for decades now, force-feeding us their dreary tales of the time Dylan was electrocuted (or whatever). Entire generations have grown up in the bloated shadow of the baby-boomers, indoctrinated to believe that their own epoch can only ever be a pale imitation of those halcyon days when the old farts still had hair and there was no such thing as a drum machine.
Well, nuts to that. Just because the commanding heights of popular culture are still in the hands of people who can remember the day Hendrix choked on his own vomit, it doesn’t mean we have to accept their judgment about anything. Remember, these are the same fools who didn’t buy the first Velvet Underground album when it came out.
This generational tyranny has weighed down on student troublemakers as much as anyone else. We are led to believe that the 1960s were a golden age for campus radicalism, when every student had a copy of Das Kapital by their bedside table and the barricades would go up at the drop of a truncheon. Nothing that’s happened since could possibly measure up.
Not quite, comrade. Of course, there’s no question there was a lot of shit going on in 1968, the ‘year of the barricades’. In France and West Germany, students fought running battles with riot police, while US campuses were rocked by demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Waves of occupations and teach-ins spread all over the developed world, even reaching placid little Ireland, where UCD experienced the so-called ‘Gentle Revolution’ and designed its new campus to be riot-proof. North of the border, student activists played a key role in the civil rights demonstrations that challenged the Unionist state: its violent response sparked off a 30-year conflict.
Student radicalism has never reached the same levels again. And in fairness, you’d be bloody knackered if things were that lively every year. But even then, activists were a minority among students: they weren’t all sitting round discussing Marx and plotting revolution. Nor did the tradition run into the ground after ’68. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, students were heavily involved in campaigns against the apartheid regime in South Africa and mobilised to demand equal rights for women and gay people.
One thing stands out from looking at the history of student activism: it all depends on what’s going on in the wider world. The ‘60s were a time when radical ideas were very much part of the mainstream. Social movements continued to nourish the campus scene over the next two decades. But the ’90s were a grim decade for progressive politics, when Maggie Thatcher’s slogan TINA (There Is No Alternative) summed up the consensus view. So it was no wonder that the tide of student radicalism receded.
But the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction over the last few years, which is good news for people who aren’t keen on the way the world is headed but don’t fancy lining up with po-faced Trotskyites barking out slogans. A new generation of environmental and anti-corporate activists found their voice after the Seattle protests of 1999. Their world-view owes more to Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas than it does to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the traditional far-left faves. If you’re not enthused by the choices on offer from the political establishment (about as meaningful as those eternal dilemmas, Pepsi vs Coke and Burger King vs McDonalds), you might find this new activism congenial.
It depends where you end up, but there’s usually something going on in colleges if you make the effort to seek it out. Everyone starts out with the same vague feeling that there’s something shitty about the way the world is organised, and it’s usually one issue (racism, Iraq) that gets people involved before they think about the bigger picture, so don’t feel like you need to have your manifesto worked out in advance. If you get involved in activism, you’ll come across many different ideologies – anarchism, feminism, socialism, environmentalism. It can all be a little baffling, so bear in mind, ideologies are just tools for helping people understand the way the world works, they become useless if they’re turned into holy writ. Doubt everything and everyone (even the radicals’ favourite guru Noam Chomsky gets things wrong often enough).
This all assumes that you want to get involved, of course. It’s not for everyone, but it can be a useful, interesting and sometimes enjoyable way to spend your time. And god knows there’s enough things in the world that need changing, so give it a thought. b