Generation Protest
Tomorrow, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in Washington, D.C., to march in support of women’s rights, and many, many more will join them in other cities in the U.S. and around the world. For some, this will be the first such event they’ve ever taken part in. But for others, especially those at the tail end of the Millennial generation, the idea of expressing their viewpoints through public protest, taking their bodies into the streets, and gathering to show collective will, is quite familiar. At Bennington College, a survey of our incoming class in 2014 revealed that a large majority of them expected to take part in some kind of demonstration while they were students here. They imagined it, in other words, as part of their college education.
We are at a transitional moment, generationally speaking — but all indications are that this penchant for speaking out will only grow among “Generation Z” or the “Post-Millennial Generation” — especially given the challenges the country is facing today. According to the research conducted by the consulting firm EAB, campus activism after the November election is at an all-time high.
Their expectations are part of the zeitgeist — we can see protest again becoming a more widely used political tool everywhere, from Occupy to Ferguson to the Arab Spring. Likewise, campus protest — in support of sanctuary for immigrants, in opposition to sexual violence and racial bias, regarding climate change and other important matters — has been a crucial element in the transformation of higher education in recent years. Sometimes these gatherings are contentious, born of anger and frustration at an injustice; other times they are not oppositional at all, functioning as a way to come together, to express common purpose and shared values, to bring into light our connections to each other and our world. Except in rare cases, where such events turn violent or function to quash conversation, protests and rallies can function as an effective tool to prompt positive change by bringing to the fore issues that have been bubbling under the surface.
We strive, as college educators, to teach students the skills that they need to be engaged citizens, including being able to identify where our institutions are failing us, expressing our dissatisfaction with the status quo, and learning how to change the system. There are many forms this can take: working with lawmakers to reduce incarceration rates, supporting local elected officials’ efforts to combat climate change, engaging with community groups and volunteer organizations to assist the most vulnerable among us, and so forth. Knowing how to protest effectively is only one tool among many — and it is a legitimate and important one.
Teaching students such skills means that there are moments when our positions — as educators and administrators — become blurred. To students, most of the time I’m “Mariko” — but no matter how accessible and supportive I am in my connection with students, my official position will always overshadow the personal, especially in times of conflict. At those moments, I am “President Silver” — I am The Establishment against whom they find themselves demonstrating. How can I be the person who helps them learn how to make their case, who urges them to deepen their understanding of their issues, who helps them to identify the ways in which they have power, and who urges them to deploy that power in ways that don’t work to inadvertently harm or impede the very people they are most trying to help — even when they see me as the “other side”?
In recent years, Bennington students have organized to make their voices heard on and off campus on a variety of pressing issues: campus sexual assault, climate change, union negotiations around health care, police brutality, and fossil fuel divestment, among others. In their demand that the College withdraw entirely its investments in companies in the fossil fuel industry, the protesters met some resistance from the administration — and rose to our challenge that they clarify their goals and support their arguments.
Because they had come to us at the very moment the College was searching for a new investment firm, we invited them to take part in the process, inviting them to draft the section of the request for proposals dealing with socially responsible investing. This was no easy task: it required them to refine what they meant when they spoke of “socially responsible investing,” learn about institutional investment, the fiduciary responsibilities of the board of trustees, how to draft an RFP, how to read and evaluate a proposal — things they didn’t know how to do when they first organized their protest. They chose one of their cohort to sit in on the investment firms’ presentations, and made a recommendation to the board. Their firm of choice won the contract — in part because they had done the legwork needed to convince us that our responsibilities and their demands could be met simultaneously.
The conversation between the students and the administration isn’t over on this issue — it will continue to be raised at different points in our collective work here. But it was, in some ways, an ideal example of how campus protest can work: in the face of pushback, the students didn’t back down — they found ways to be heard, with support from the institution. We gave them some guideposts and they studied the system they were protesting in order to find the right mechanisms and the right pressure points to achieve their goal of minimizing the College’s contribution to global climate change.
Not all moments of campus protest have such a productive resolution — but as educators, we must know that this is a challenge that is not going anywhere anytime soon. Every time they take to the streets — on campus or off, locally or nationally or globally — our students are telling us that they want to remake the world as they wish it to be. Their college experience should be teaching them, in the broadest sense, how to effect that change — and our work as their teachers should involve learning to respond, even if we are sometimes on opposite sides of the table.
