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Activism
4/27/00

In all my time at Cornell, and throughout many of my columns, I have been preoccupied with a single concept: why it is so hard to instigate social change. After five years here I have at long last come to understand the reason. Social change, if it is to happen, requires two ingredients: awareness of what the problem is, and then empowerment to fix it. Unfortunately, these two ingredients almost never occur in tandem, and here I will attempt to outline why. 

The crux of the problem is that empowerment requires education, and the current educational system is structurally opposed to an instilled sense of global awareness.

Ever since the end of World War II, the nature of the university has been changing. The Vannevar Bush Report first allowed the military to finally realize the value of universities as weapons. Corporate power was then similarly quick to employ them as research tools. And why not? Costs of this research is then shared with the taxpayers. So now we have places like the Cornell Theory Center, one of the most powerful computer facilities in the world, focusing on computational finance of all things. Instead of being used to solve food distribution problems, or make cost-effective irrigation plans, itÕs being wielded to make investment banks like Goldman Sachs a little more profitable. 

More steps must be taken to insure that universities serve the interest of the public at large. Under the current system, many costs fall on the public while the profits are privatized. Instead, the power of universities needs to be taken advantage of not only by the industrial and military complexes, but to an increased degree by the groups fighting for social change. 

Ironically, the social position that allows someone to get an education at a place like this is the very thing that stifles their global awareness. Prosperity is its own blindfold. Not only are you insulated from the bad neighborhoods where the real problems are, you are insulated from the personal experience of poverty and pain that would normally compel you to hate these problems. In other words, we have a system that offers plenty of education to effect change, but concentrates this empowerment on apathetic people.

The absurdity of this arrangement is especially apparent in other countries. When I lived in Mexico, I found that I could get an incredibly rich sense of the societal problems at hand from the taxi drivers and people on the street. But if I tried to ask someone in my elite private school about what was going on that had the country in such disarray, my questions were met with confusion or oblivion. 

Glancing across the Cornell international community, I often find the same unconcern. Many are unconcerned with ever addressing the problems their nations face, and many have no intention of ever returning. 

Indeed, some would say that the greatest imperialism we commit against other countries is to siphon off their greatest minds forever. Poor countries foot the bill for twenty-five years of education for their best and brightest, only to have their investment stolen away at the instant they become useful. 

So these are obvious mechanisms by which awareness does not infiltrate the halls of higher learning to blend with education. It is during college admissions where the two are most distilled apart, often irreversibly. 

Now, to be fair it is important to pay respects to the exceptions to the rule. Cornell has an impressive activist community that seems to be brimming with a supernatural concern for the state of the world. However, these activists also inspire concern that rationality and morality have not yet reached their fullest union. 

Activists live a challenging life in that they somehow have to act crazy enough to get attention, while still coming across as straight-on, normal human beings that we should listen to. Much of the activism IÕve witnessed here in the last five years has failed to find this balance. 

The animal rights movement, for example, has developed a special notoriety that now causes administrators and most students to write them off as radical and insensible. Breaking into labs and freeing woodchucks is crazy enough stuff to get you press, but what theyÕre ultimately after is converts. They forfeited rationality in choosing their approach, and all of their morality fell on deaf ears. 

Similar advice to the socially-minded can be gleaned from the Latino 
Studies Program movement. In this case the students basically mixed an 
"us-against-them" mentality that alienated the majority of non-Latino 
students from their cause, with a set of unrealistic demands that made 
negotiations with the administration impossible. An idea gains natural 
momentum when launched from the moral high ground, but it wonÕt travel 
very far if it must overcome the gravity of what's legislatively 
possible. Sometimes it seems like people get so swept up in the thrill 
of the protest that they forget that they're ultimately trying to reach 
an audience, that they're ultimately trying to do something besides 
making noise. 

And of course thereÕs the Cornell Review, which I will use to illustrate 
my point even if it means submitting to their tactics and giving them 
press. Here you have the epitome of a group that has in many cases a 
positive message, but actively repels people from their cause through 
their silly synergy of over-enthusiasm and bitter contempt. Making 
absolutely no effort to reach any non-conservatives, and testing the 
boundaries of their own impunity like a little sister teasing their older 
brother, the Review serves as a textbook case for Cornell students on how 
NOT to elicit the social changes you are clever enough to imagine.  

There is a dangerous value in many activist communities that if you dress 
or act like the people in power, you are advocating the other side. 
Overalls are preferred to suits, and carrying a laptop might be selling 
out, all in the interest of maintaining the grassroots image. But this 
is the exact image that needs to be shed! They need to realize that most 
codes of conduct that exist amongst the political and business elite are 
there because they are tools to generate respect and status. By 
rejecting these well-established devices, the activist community 
consistently forfeits a great deal of acknowledgment from the average 
American. They may be iconoclasts of ideology, which are always healthy 
to have around, but they surrender a lot of respect when they rebel 
against conventional dress codes and etiquette. They are trying to 
change international policy, and should present themselves with an 
appropriate professionalism. Activists in general need to clean up their 
image if theyÕre ever going to get the recognition theyÕre demanding. 
Hopefully anyone with the gall to fly in the face of the status quo will 
not be too renegade to recognize other conventions.