To meaningfully confront issues on campus, we need to build student power. This is why the Student Union calls for campus democracy.
“If we are to address our common crisis as students, as current and future workers, as people living on this planet, we need to focus on building our power … Building student power means gaining more and more control over our colleges and the decisions that affect us as students. In the end, student power means a student-run educational system. It’s our education — we should control it.” — “Toward a Student Unionism” by Jasper Conner
The Ohio University Student Union decided on three central demands at the beginning of this year: a unionized student workforce, a responsible endowment featuring divestment from prisons and fossil fuels and the implementation of mandatory, student-led cultural competency classes for all freshmen. This sounds like, and arguably is, a lot. More, it seems, than one group can feasibly accomplish. However, all the problems addressed by these campaigns are not disparate. Rather, these problems share the same root cause. It is the same root cause that led to the gutting of the Survivor Advocacy Program a few weeks ago, mass firings of resident assistants in August, an absurd bonus and raise for McDavis, the union busters currently trying to break the call center union and arguably even the $50 Halloween fee.
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This root cause is that we, as students, are made to have no power over the decisions that affect us. If students democratically managed our university’s investments, I doubt we would be invested in the fossil fuel industry, for instance. If students were allowed to manage the university’s course catalogue, we would have cultural competency courses by now — it’s been in high enough demand. BLAC, the Student Union and even the more conservative Student Senate have called for such a program. The problem is, we can make all these requests, but we aren’t the ones who actually make these decisions. There is no official channel for students to have any actual control over our education or tangible decision making power. The university administration may respond that we have the senate, but last year we used the senate to demand cultural competency courses and divestment from fossil fuels to no effect. The current senate is, in their efforts, not having much better luck.
This is why the student body is not only marching on Nov. 12 for cultural competency courses, not only for fossil fuel divestment and not only for student worker unionization — but for campus democracy. We want to move toward the unionization of the entire campus population. With legally protected unions, power could be decentralized and redistributed. I know that this demand sounds crazy, and I know that it won’t be met on November 12. However, it’s worth noting that the Rally for Campus Democracy is part of a national event called the Million Student March with over 100 marches nationwide. This just goes to show that we, here at OU, are not isolated. We are part of a much wider student populace with whom we share the burden of rising tuition, crushing debt and disempowerment.
The current way of doing things cannot last. Tuition cannot keep rising at the rate that it is, and students cannot continue taking on more and more debt, if we, as a nation, want to preserve some guise of public higher education.
The Student Senate can pass resolution after resolution, but we want a different form of university governance. We want a governance that is actually shared — one in which we as students actually have power — so that we can begin managing our own education. So march with us at 5 p.m. Nov. 12, and demand a campus democracy. But don’t stop there. Instead, help us to carve out spaces such as student-managed cultural competency classes and student worker unions where we can actually begin achieving some semblance of shared governance. In this way, we can eventually seize this university.
Daniel Kington is a sophomore studying English and a Student Union organizer. He is also an officer of the Sierra Student Coalition. Will you be present at the November 12th rally? Email him at dk982513@ohio.edu.
