Getting a Grip on Student Involvement
admin November 15th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Frances will be the featured speaker for the 14th Annual Berklee College of Music Liberal Arts Symposium next April. Both faculty and students are gearing up to consider where art and action meet, in the words of Camille Colatosti, Chair of the Liberal Arts Department, “to use our creative energy to build a world that promotes ‘living democracy,’ that empowers individuals and emphasizes community.” In the process, Berklee is reaching out to the entire Boston educational community.
University outreach has been on my mind for some time, and this is a sign of much more to come. You‘ve read Frances’ posts about Suffolk and Worcester. She has also visited the University of Connecticut, Portland State, Denver and Washington in St. Louis. Just after Thanksgiving, she is going to Calgary and to Santa Clara. Frances has tremendous rapport with students, creating tremendous synergy.
I, however, have a slightly clandestine interest in university outreach (cue the lightning flash and thunder clap).
In graduate school, I worked with—and eventually led—a student action group. Initially an outsider, I saw thousands of causes with which to align and this group had not aligned with any. Rather than binding the group to a movement of my choosing, I initiated an exploration; we undertook almost every action about which at least two of the members were passionate. We ran the range, too, from landmine clearance to human trafficking.
During that time, the splintering of interests struck me. I was amazed how odd our group was, reaching across ideological boundaries. It was a vital aspect of our work, but it limited our allies. The death-penalty activists were happy to join our prison work, but not tabling for Sudan. The civil rights folks loved our work on human trafficking, but not our Heifer fund raising. Yet our group was not weakened by our wide reach. We were empowered because we came to understand that clearing landmines was intimately connected to ending human trafficking, to prison reform, and to poverty relief.
In Getting a Grip, Frances outlines—and helps you grapple with the process of personally developing—a world view that counteracts this factioning of interests. By showing that every aspect of individual involvement is leading to a newly empowered electorate—a citizenry which is immediately attached to the processes that guide government—Living Democracy offers a way to rejoin what has been artificially split. Perhaps it is even a way to join student groups more ecologically with groups in their communities at-large.
Frances describes four revolutions that make this shift possible. I see two of these, revolutions in human dignity and ecological understanding, as the pivotal pair. While the communication/knowledge and the networking revolutions are essential components to the emergence of Living Democracy, the human-ecological continuum is, to me, the sine qua non of this “movement.” Realizing the web that binds us all reveals that making changes around the world, requires reevaluating and revaluing what is immediately at hand (the genius of Mother Teresa!).
The instinctual connection that makes me feel most human when I am involved with others leads me to see that genuinely valuing humanity—one person at a time—is the core to all of these efforts, even those that seem to be connected only to nature. (Can we preserve any life if we do not share at least some relationship to it? Do not animal rights require relationality, even if the nature of that relationship is to diminish contact?)
The concept of Living Democracy—just as it demands that we see the value of every individual—signifies that we all must be bound into this web, not as spectators, but as actors.
These movements are not separate; such isolation is both limiting and artificial. Living Democracy sets the frame squarely around these groups and highlights their common interest. Restoring this radical unity is essential if student movements—indeed citizen movements—hope to effectively impact the crises we face.
Peace, Mark
