As the recent country-wide student strike swept through Germany, it was hard, as an American, to think of similar instances of student activism in the States. As the already-exorbitant price for a college education rises faster than the inflation rate—my own college joined the ranks this year of those private colleges whose yearly tuition has risen above the $50,000 mark—students in America seem either more accepting of their fate or unaccustamed to the protest culture that so dominates European socialist societies such as Germany.
But despite the relative calm in American institutions of higher education, there have been several instances of student protests in the past year, and strikes this winter at two schools in New York I think shed some light on the differences between ourselves and Germans when it comes to student-led movements for education reform. In looking at these strikes, I hope to explain why we, as Americans, have failed to revolt in response to the injustices of our own education system.
The New School
One evening this last December, 75 New School students barricaded themselves in a dining hall to call for the resignation of the school’s embattled president and several other senior members of the administration. The number of students occupying the building varied over the 30-hour “occupation” (as the students called it), and at one point the number of students was as high as 200.
The protester’s demands were ultimately reduced to voting to agree to four terms negotiated with the president—namely, amnesty for the students involved, more study space to replace a library slated for demolition, more student participation in selection of the provost and establishment of a student committee to oversee socially responsible investments of the university’s endowment.
30 hours after the protest began, dumpsters and cafeteria tables were shoved aside as the 50 remaining occupiers spread peacefully into the street—some shouting in jubilation.
The strike was seen as successful and notable, not only for that but for the very fact of its occurrence. Student strikes are relatively scarce in the States, especially at private schools like the New School, where, it can be argued, students can just take their tuition money elsewhere if they feel dissatisfied. The strike was reported on by the New York Times and other major media outlets, and provided a framework for a second occupation two months later at NYU.
NYU
The New School protest is useful in understanding American student mentalities, if only to compare it to the relative failure of the NYU student strike—modeled almost exactly after the New School’s—in which 15 students were suspended for barricading themselves in a school cafeteria for two days, calling themselves members of a protest organization called “Take Back NYU!” (A recent graduate emphasized that "a lot of [the protesters] weren’t even NYU students. They don’t represent NYU under any circumstances. No one knew what was going on. No one knew any of them.”)
For two days, the student strikers barricaded themselves in a cafeteria, and published a list of demands that included amnesty for themselves, more financial transparency from the board of trustees, public access to the NYU library, scholarships for Palestinian students and for extra school supplies to be sent to the Gaza Strip.
The strike, at first glance, is not so different than the New School’s. The wider and far-reaching scope of their demands, however, along with a fairly embarrassing (and widely-circulated) youtube video made by one of the strikers first elicited scrutiny, then ridicule.
The video was published by nyulocal.com and spread from there. The video is condemning—at one point, when the videographer is cataloguing the protesters’ belongings in case of their confiscation, he picks up a water bottle and tosses it back in the bag, remarking with disdain, “[NYU officials] probably don’t want a water bottle. They probably drink corporate water.” He then moves on, listing aloud, “Macbook…Macbook charger...iPod…Macbook charger…” The irony, clearly, is lost on him. It was not, however, lost on the Internet.
In comparison to Germany—where, as Braden and Alli noted earlier in this blog, the student strikers in Bamberg last week respected regulations like the maximum allowable time in which to hold up traffic while crossing the street—the NYU student protesters expected not only attention and capitulation from those they addressed, but before, and perhaps more than that, they expected a fight. Their behavior looked dated—like they were taking their cues from a movie they saw once—and it made me wonder, if, without a general protest culture like that in Germany, the few of us who raise our fists against the man just don’t quite know how to do it.
Responses to the NYU strike
Gawker.com, a blog ostensibly about the New York media scene and infamous for its near-constant stream of unfiltered snark, especially loathed the protesters:
…while student activism in decades past was at least defensible as going after one pillar of establishment power, academia in 2009 is just a finishing school for rich kids and a playground for people who'd really like to spend their professional careers wrestling with the least important but most dramatic office politics in the world, so they can someday net that $300k salary and the reduced mortgage, only to get shit on by Politco and the rest of the world for making a living with their book-learnin' elitism.
So our advice to these kids is to go have a fucking cigarette and then Drop Out. Tell your parents to put the tuition money in a trust fund so you can continue living the life to which you were born accustomed as you volunteer to build some fucking houses somewhere, and then when that runs out why not get your degree at CUNY or something so you can sleep better at night.
More than anything, this sort of scornful dismissal seemed to show how little support there is in America for protests of this kind. The venom and speed with which bloggers responded to the protests seemed to express a widely-held belief that protests are generally ineffectual, and even that protesters themselves are entitled (of course, the actions of the NYU protesters themselves didn’t exactly help their case).
Perhaps the most telling response to the protest was that of the NYU student body. While it was happening, and especially after it, the strikers’ fellow students seemed overall to try to distance themselves from it. And if any student body has a right to protest, it has to be NYU’s. The cost of the school, including room and board, is just over the $50,000 mark. Add to that the day-to-day expense of living in New York City, and you’ve got yourself a very pricey undergraduate degree.
The school itself is notoriously stingy with financial aid. Clarissa Wallace, a recent graduate, told me that she owes over $40,000 in loans—from four different lenders, no less, and in the current crisis she has found herself unable to consolidate them—but that compared to some of her classmates, she has it easy. “I know people who owe $120,000 for a degree in acting,” she told me with disbelief.
The protesters, while by any account justified in many of their complaints, somehow failed to key into the general discontent of their fellow students. They acted alone. I think the small number of protesters and the derision aimed at them by their fellows points not only to the failures of the NYU protest, but also to a general belief held by students in America, in which we see ourselves not as collective bargainers, but as individual achievers.
Rather than depending on the state help support our family, to pay for college, to give us a house, a job, health care, in our capitalist nation we’re inheritors of the proverbial American Dream. And I think this is one of the most essential differences in explaining the differences between American and German student activism. In America, as we strive hard to achieve individual success, it’s hard to imagine expecting from those in power as much as German students do from their government. This core conviction—the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality—is, I think, why so few American students have taken to the streets. And ultimately, I think that it’s for this belief—that we can make it on our own, that we should make it on our own—that we stay at home, and leave the protesting to our European counterparts.
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