A Student Movement
The fight to take back power from bureaucratic systems has been a staple of the industrial and political ages of the modern world. Forming unions and trying to give a voice to those who are the backbone of many organizations has been a struggle in which multitudes have taken part. Taking action, protesting, and organizing for equity has been able to cause major changes in policy throughout the world, helping workers to have their voices heard. However, this is not something that may only pertain to those with jobs working nine to five. The ideas of a union and the support it can bring can apply to students as well.
Throughout many major cities and colleges in the United States and other countries, students demanding change through protest and strike has been recurrent. Most notably would be actions taken during the Civil Rights Movement. The Greensboro sit-ins were enacted by four teenage college students in North Carolina. Their protest soon helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which would organize many other protests. In 1968, students of Howard and Columbia Universities led protests against their colleges for fairer treatment and a judiciary voice, succeeding in most of their goals. These instances illustrate the power that a student's voice can have, especially when joined together, to influence the state of their university.
Close to Home
The complaints started to gain traction in early November. A student of Central Michigan University tweeted about an issue they had encountered in one of the dorm cafeterias. With their meal plan, they were allotted a certain number of swipe-ins per week and sometimes allowed their sibling or a friend to swipe in with their card. This meant that the student, having already paid for a certain number of meals, was simply giving them away, not having the need to use every single one for themselves.
However, a policy had been in place that put a stop to this. For fears of stolen ID’s being used for meals, a twenty-five dollar fine had been enacted to anyone who used an ID that was not theirs. While this policy does make sense in some instances, many students were frustrated by the fact that meals would go wasted, ones that they had already paid for, while there were many other students, sometimes friends or siblings, that might need a meal instead. This is where a new group stepped into the picture.
Affecting Change on Campus
The Student Civic Union was an organization that had been in the works by a few student leaders since the beginning of the fall semester. This controversy on Twitter gave them an opportunity to test their voice and the ability to influence the university in a meaningful way as well as to address an issue that would bring attention to their group and mission on campus. As the conversation had begun on twitter, many of the group’s members began to respond to tweets with their unified ideas to work towards a solution.
Their solution included two parts: to take down the fine that punished the students for letting others use their ID and to implement a meal-sharing program in which students could donate their unused meals to those who were food-insecure on campus. This allowed for students to still use the meals that they had paid for, even if not for themselves, and would ease fears of using a stolen ID for meals as that would no longer be necessary. Spreading quite quickly among student Twitter users, the issue as a whole, along with the solution, took almost no time to reach the highest ranks of the administration. Before Thanksgiving, Central Michigan University’s President, Dr. Bob Davies, had responded on Twitter with a number of tweets beginning to address some of the concerns.
However, the group didn’t settle for just a response on social media. A petition was made on Change.org to gain support for the idea of a meal-swipe program, receiving well over five-thousand signatures in the process. There was also an organized protest outside of the RFOC, the cafeteria cited in the tweet that started the whole conversation, in order to get students to sign the petition, many saying they already had. Working hard to spread awareness, the Student Civic Union caused the issue to be spread much farther than it normally would have. It also made sure that responses from the university were actually addressing the issue and meal-swipe idea instead of sidestepping it all together, often replying with questions under posts made by the college. All of this caused many students, often through Twitter, to look more critically at the policies of the university as well as the responses from the administration.
Mission Statement
Directly in the “bio” of the CMU’s Student Civic Union Twitter account are their reasons for taking action on campus:
Making students more aware of the issues surrounding them on campus as well as having them look at the administration through a more critical lens is one of the main missions of the Student Civic Union. They want to highlight some of the issues that arise from a campus that is centered on upholding the school and administrators instead of working with and for the students. One of these practices is the Housing Policy. Requiring students to stay in the dorms, sometimes up to two years, can add quite a lot of financial investment compared to being able to rent an apartment. This illustrates perfectly the kind of policies that are detrimental to a student’s freedom of choice and control over how they make it through college financially.
Another major area that the group wants to bring attention to is how the cost per credit hour has risen over the past three decades. Tuition prices have skyrocketed around the country in the recent past and the change is all the more evident when compared with the rise of inflation. At CMU, the cost per credit has risen to almost three times what inflation would have accounted for from the price in 1993.
Outlining the entire mission of the Student Civic Union, below is a portion of a conversation had with Duncan Tierney, one of the student organizers of the union, who explains the purposes of the group, what issues they will be trying to take on, and why their mission is essential to the view they have for the university and its students.
