Recently, business card-sized pamphlets distributed throughout several common spaces on campus announced a new, unofficial student group called Wooster Students for Collective Radical Action and Mobilization (WooSCRAM). A post on its website entitled “Mission Statement” says, “We are an organized body of leftist students with a diverse range of left-of-liberal views seeking to establish a leftist tradition at Wooster committed to activism and community engagement.”
This is a noble and important mission. However, WooSCRAM, in its current iteration, is misguided in ways that make it unhelpful and, in some ways, harmful to the campus community.
A leftist tradition for a society as unique as The College of Wooster’s will look very different from leftist traditions in American society in general. Building a leftist tradition for the College requires starting from scratch and thinking rigorously about what visions and tactics are most effective.
I am not satisfied that the organizers of WooSCRAM have wholly engaged in this thoughtful founding process. It seems that, instead, they have largely defaulted to examples of radical leftist movements in American society. This has led WooSCRAM astray from the most effective iteration of itself in at least two important ways.
First, WooSCRAM must confront and embrace the reality that they have the opportunity to effect change in a much more direct and immediate way than radical leftist movements in American society.
A post on WooSCRAM’s website explains that the organization does not intend to become chartered, declaring, “our organization cannot in good conscience engage in a process by which the rules, regulations and bureaucracy are dictated by the administration.”
Of course, in American society in general, radical leftist groups rarely work with government or corporate institutions because they do not have the ability to directly effect immediate change within them. The Occupy Wall Street movement could not have simply lobbied Congress to abolish financial institutions as we know them and masterfully redistribute the wealth in America. The corporate and government institutions of the United States are too complex and rigid to allow for such radical, far-off visions.
WooSCRAM, on the other hand, does have the ability to effect real, immediate change at Wooster. Here, no idea is too far-off to at least be heard and seriously considered. Dean Brown holds office hours for the sole purpose of hearing ideas from students. This month, the Board of Trustees will hold the semi-annual Student Development Meeting. Looking back at my notes from last year’s meeting, it looks like five out of six groups that expressed a desire for some major improvement have that major improvement today — including administrative staff members for Greek Life and for service and civic responsibility; a sexual assault notification system; and a fund for faculty diversity. When all else fails, students can usually get meetings with President Bolton and take their ideas straight to the top (though this strategy should be used sparingly).
Thus, if WooSCRAM is to be the most effective version of itself, it is not enough for it to speak loudly about grand problems with the large scale institutions of the College; it must also embrace the opportunity that it has to do something about them. That may not require becoming a chartered organization, but it will require working with the people responsible for leading the College.
Secondly, WooSCRAM has demonized those people — the administrators of the College — in a way that is unnecessary for their work and ultimately harmful to the campus community.
For example, in the same post on its website, WooSCRAM alleges that the College’s administration is driven primarily by a desire “to maintain an reputation [sic] and image of orderliness to grow their prestige and bring in more money to the College.”
This is very simply not true. It may be true, albeit pessimistically, of the corporate or government institutions that American radical leftist movements tackle. And, indeed, the only way I can imagine that WooSCRAM and its organizers developed such a view of the College’s administration is by taking the narratives that we have in liberal culture for describing large scale institutions and overlaying them onto the College’s administration. This overlaying is intellectually dishonest. The College’s administration is far smaller, more flexible, more human and more small-D democratic than any of the large scale institutions of the United States.
This type of demonizing rhetoric that paints the College’s administration as some monolithic force of order and oppression is harmful to the College community because it plays into a false narrative through which many students already view the administration. This narrative is what allows us, when we are upset with some decision or problem at the College, to uncritically blame “The Administration” without giving any thought to who specifically made that decision, why they made it and what we can do to change their minds.
Of course, radical leftist ideology and activism center on skepticism of and disdain for large scale institutions, and to call for WooSCRAM to eschew this trait would be to call for an end to radical leftist activism on this campus, which I do not at all intend. Yet I strongly believe that there must be a more intellectually honest version of this skepticism and disdain that more closely reflects the humanity and democracy of the College’s administration and does not further entrench the narrative that already accounts for so much of the distance between students and “The Administration” here at Wooster.
Tristan Lopus, an Editor in Chief for the Voice, can be reached for comment at TLopus18@wooster.edu.