Dig in and Look Beyond Appearances: Campus Politics Lacks Community

*

One summer afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I caught up with an old friend of mine. Nora Tabesh Estrada and I were roommates when we were 16 years old, living in Washington, D.C. as students at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership (SEGL). We talked about our jobs, me driving around the city as part of a homelessness and addiction outreach team and her researching education. Soon, we began to discuss political engagement on campus (she at Barnard College of Columbia and me at Harvard), which often feels like it has no vision. I was excited by her thinking and, wanting to explore these ideas more, I suggested we write together. I was also excited that she would be the first other undergraduate I write with in this series. 

politics is more than an identity

KATHERINE: I’ve been reflecting on a weird mode of political engagement I have experienced on campus. It became clear to me as I thought about Harvard’s Graduate Student Union strike last year. Large classes were picketed, and the union asked students not to cross a picket line to attend class if it was being picketed. When I was passing out flyers and sharing information about the strike, most students seemed to agree to not cross picket lines. But many of these same students found some alternative way to get to class, away from the picketing–usually some basement or back entrance.

To me, these students endorsed the picketing with one hand but undermined it with the other, since getting to class thwarted the picketing’s aim of bringing campus activity to a halt. At the time, my friends I spoke with about it didn’t see this practice as hypocritical. I wanted to know what ideas about politics underlay their thinking.

What was happening, I think, is that the support of the strike had become about an aesthetic: Students did not want to be seen as the sort of person who crossed the picket line. It was a bad look. So they got to class another way. 

Thinking about it more, perhaps the entire picket line appealed to something similar. When I was handing out flyers to people passing, I would tell them, don’t cross the picket line. This is not a message of solidarity, or a vision for the world wherein graduate student workers receive higher wages and work in better conditions. I spoke to my peers about the kind of person they should want to be, that is, people who don’t cross the picket line. The appeal I was making to my peers was about their own identity. 

In my own engagement with the strike, I didn’t know the specifics of the graduate student workers’ demands, beyond what I needed so I could explain them to others. But I knew that I wanted to be the sort of person who supported the strike. And so I did, almost as if I was playing a part. Honestly, I didn’t think anything would change because of the strike. Harvard seemed so powerful, and we protestors, so small. But that didn’t seem to affect me too much, since either way I would get to be the sort of activist college student I imagined myself as. 

Participating in politics just to create an identity seems shallow on intuition alone, but I want to think through this more.

David Graeber writes that the most important work of our lives is constructing ourselves and each other, including designing our own identities. But creating an identity for ourselves may ripple outward. In my reading of Richard Rorty, much of the ethical history of humanity can be summed up as just us deciding who gets to be included in the definition of us, which has expanded over millennia. It would make a difference if someone came to understand herself as inclusive, loving, and fair, especially if she previously defined herself in terms of the supposed supremacy of her racial or religious group.

But I cannot imagine that all politics are just these redefinitions, or perhaps my examples hide that redefinition means not only a change of one’s belief but also that one works on the world in response to how one sees oneself and one’s role in it. For instance, when David Graeber writes that all politics is ultimately fighting over the meaning of life, surely we also have to live out our understandings, too, or politics would present fewer problems than it actually does. 

Paulo Freire helps us out here, too. To become a subject in the world, we cannot just take a stance on the world, such as recognizing oppression and deciding that it is bad. We have to realize that we are capable of making change in the world, and we have to act on it. 

So there is a place for finding identities. Sometimes, I protest violence I see no end to, or I hold space for what has happened long ago. In these situations, I feel like I am mourning, or hoping for the impossible, rather than protesting in the normal sense. Such action reminds me who I am and helps me to understand the world. But I cannot believe that this action is what all politics amounts to. I think I need to have vision.

politics is about working out our problems and it is hard

NORA: It is interesting that the political issues at the forefront of campus discourse are typically very material and immediate, though our engagement with them often doesn’t feel very real. I go to Barnard College of Columbia University, and last fall graduate student workers at Columbia went on strike for 10 weeks. As with Harvard, there were many students who outwardly expressed support for the strike yet crossed the picket line in roundabout ways, which was obviously frustrating but also quite strange.

The aesthetic engagement with politics— which you’ve identified— did not translate into any serious, material political action or behavior. This is, of course, antithetical to the very action of a strike!

Now, I don’t want to overstate our political engagement at SEGL because a lot of it was very rhetorical and limited to theoretical and ideological debates. But I do think we approached our political discourse with real seriousness and intention— I’m particularly thinking of the discussions around gender we had that semester. Many of us female students were frustrated by some comments and behaviors of our male peers and had concerns about their attitudes towards women. I recall many impassioned conversations at night in our majority-girls’ dorm, where we agreed that we felt disrespected and demeaned.

These discussions could have very easily stayed confined to our dorm, but ultimately we made the collective decision to bring the conversations out of our dorm and tackle our semester’s issues with misogyny head-on. We organized an entire night devoted to airing out our experiences and concerns; this involved really difficult and personal conversations and was an intense, emotional experience for everyone involved. In some cases, the night involved individual processes of reconciliation and forgiveness. But we all approached it with seriousness and a desire to better our community, and both you and I remember it as one of our most rewarding SEGL experiences.

I believe that what made this discussion night (which we called Gender Flex) so effective and moving was the nature of our SEGL community and the stake we all had in it. Our semester at SEGL was incredibly close and our senses of both community and communion were remarkably strong. There was a feeling that if we did not confront this issue head on it would diminish our community as a whole, so we all embraced the chance to participate.

It wasn’t easy, but we all cherished the community we had developed and therefore truly wanted to better it. Our community made our engagement both necessary and meaningful.

To bring this back to the graduate student worker strikes at our respective universities, perhaps all students would have more actively supported the strikes had there been a stronger sense that our universities’ communities depended on the wellbeing of the graduate students — which they frankly did, as the strike strongly affected all levels of the university! I think that a lack of real, intentional community meant that students were able to get away with only passively or aesthetically engaging with the strike.

politics is about love

Katherine, reading and waiting for a friend in Boston. 

KATHERINE: I think you’re right to single out community as an important quality in real political engagement. Through that word, I think we can work through “cancel culture.” That buzzword is often thrown around disingenuously. But, whatever is real that the phrase does get at, Gender Flex was its complete opposite. When there were issues, rather than stop speaking to someone or trying to throw them out of our lives, we created a space to bring our concerns forward.

I think one reason we did this was that each person was important to making our community run. We were a small cohort and interacted with each other constantly, and also each person had chore responsibilities that directly helped to upkeep the space. A second reason that allowed us to engage with each other was that we understood that people can change, even if what they’re doing is hurting us. We were all so young, coming from different places with different expectations of behavior, and we all knew each of us was taking part in an intense period of learning and growth. We knew people’s errors didn’t make them inherently evil or something. So we saw potential in trying to work things out with each other. What would it mean to bring these two ideas, that each person is important and can grow and change, to our campus politics? 

My question is almost like asking what would our communities look like if we endorsed Emmanuel Levinas’ “you shall not kill,” by which he means that we are responsible for each other’s lives. He is making a phenomenological observation that we feel this responsibility to take care of each other. That’s the most basic ethical demand to live by. Aside from Levinas, I find this idea more fleshed out in radical Christianity than philosophy, such as when Jesus dines with tax collectors, the most hated member of a community, or when the Good Samaritan chose to stop on a dangerous road, putting his life in danger to help someone from a different ethnic group.

Such a mode of political engagement would not bulldoze over people. Too often, especially at my school, activists and leaders alike believe that they are smarter than the community they are supposedly helping: People’s opposition is an obstacle to overcome; solutions come first, and afterwards everyone else can come to accept them. I think this is a defective form of politics, and I often hear it from well-meaning people concerned about the world. 

This mode of politics would also be welcoming. In my own work in homelessness and addiction, I sometimes meet people who have done awful things, perhaps decades ago or maybe even in the time I have known them. I want to be — I am trying to be — the sort of person who can hear about this and not treat anyone differently. It’s the right thing to do.  

There are times when you cannot work with everyone. When trying to maintain a homeless shelter, as my friend wisely pointed out, you must balance the right of one person to shelter with everyone’s right to a safe and calm space. So sometimes people are not allowed into shelter, and we must practice “love from a distance that is safe,” in the words of the hip hop feminist Joan Morgan. But, more often than I see someone kicked out or barred from entering a shelter with love, I have seen it done cruelly and even sadistically. 

NORA: I believe that many of our typical modes of political engagement complicate the kind of politics you’re talking about, especially overly online politics.

When politics are transferred online we lose the mutual investment, community, and relationships that are critical to love-driven politics. How can you possibly foster care for and community with strangers who are physically distanced from you, many behind a wall of anonymity? Without true community behind it, political engagement tends to lose its tangibility and realness— it becomes sterile, depersonalized, and unproductive. Furthermore, in fast-paced and snippy dialogue online, there is very little incentive to hear people out, engage in good faith, and develop care for one another. 

I think there is also something about the nature of platforms like Instagram and Twitter that make political rhetoric and dialogue particularly challenging. The written word on these platforms is shorter, more free-flowing, and ostensibly lower stakes than formal writing, yet there is also a literal ability to screenshot content and circulate it in initially unintended ways. Perhaps you made a Tweet that you now disagree with, or posted something out of turn without thinking it through— no matter how much your politics have changed or how many times you have meaningfully apologized, there will always be some kind of digital record of your words that can be used against you. It is therefore remarkably easy to dismiss or ‘discard’ others and their politics.

In fast-paced and snippy dialogue online, there is very little incentive to hear people out, engage in good faith, and develop care for one another. 

I don’t want to wholly discount the utility of social media and the Internet as a tool for politics. I think that social media can be a useful tool for political organizing, raising awareness when it is necessary, and bringing others in. I think it can be particularly useful in the context of electoral politics. But I am concerned by politics that seem to have been overtaken by social media. Such politics are dominated by aesthetics and appearances. 

Because community and love are so critical to a more constructive form of politics, it is often necessary to do the work of building and strengthening community ourselves. Our outpourings of solidarity online mean little if they do not reflect our real-life relationships and behaviors. I think again about our experience with Gender Flex at SEGL: to come together and air our feelings and beliefs out in the open was not easy or comfortable and required work. But it strengthened our community and care for one another — coming together was not only driven by love, but it also advanced our love for each other.

universities can make people capable of politics

TOGETHER: We want to become capable of the tough work of politics. We see this work as in line with the missions of our universities, which invariably discuss making the world a better place by educating its inhabitants and future leaders. How can this goal be achieved if the opposite behavior is modeled? Our universities should be good stewards of the land, wealth, and collections they possess. We are disturbed by the incredibly strained relationship our schools have with surrounding communities and various activist groups. We seriously doubt that we can become responsible people in this world if, believing in the messaging of our schools, we turn the other way when development projects threaten local communities, when museum collections include stolen artifacts, and when endowments are invested and money is made through exploitative practices and underpaying staff. We want to work with the university on this, including when that means working against the university. We want to take part in helping our universities to pursue these aims that will ultimately also form our education. We want to engage in the local communities around our universities and work on being good neighbors ourselves, putting down some roots here, rather than merely passing through. We want our education to engage questions important to us, and we want to bring them up. 

*

After speaking with Nora, I felt like I had work ahead of me. In our little cohort a couple years ago, we worked to mend relationships when they were challenged, and we tried to grow as individuals and as a community. But I did not want my ideas about politics and campus community to stay in my head. To have integrity, I want to dig in, trying to practice love and personal accountability, even in environments where that seems like an odd thing to do. Maybe that is what I need to do to live seriously or to live in a way that it matters what I do.

I thought up my upcoming time away from the university, too. What am I trying to get away from? Where am I trying to go? Above all, what do I want to learn?

---

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.