Why We Need A Democracy Teach-In

This week, students at more than 110 major college campuses across America are taking their education into their own hands in one of the biggest nationally-organized student movements since anti-apartheid in the '80s. This kind of student discussion is especially needed at Harvard, where no one seems to have a good answer for questions like: Why do we still have the Core? What happened with the grape vote? Or even, did we just almost go to war with Iraq?

A group of students, me included, have organized Harvard's week-long Democracy Teach-In in an attempt to bring students together to talk about their place in the University and the University's place in the world--to learn about the ways that politics isn't just something for Washington or even the Undergraduate Council, the ways all our educational experiences (where we live, what courses we get to take, what kind of activities are supported on campus) are determined by political decisions. These are decisions we as students don't usually get to make.

So what does democracy have to do with a Harvard education? We're not talking about student government here. What we want, what we think students have the right to demand, is to take our education into our own hands, to open up space to challenge what's being taught and what's not, by whom, to whom and for whom. No university education can really call itself an education if it doesn't allow students a voice in determining both the form and content of that education. And this means giving students the chance to teach themselves--which is itself a political education. It means getting together to talk among ourselves about how things in the world affect our lives as students, and about how what we do as students affects the rest of the world.

And it means making the people who make decisions in the University listen to what we have to say. But to do this we have to understand how the University works, what its role is in the larger society and what we think about the options we're given as we're prepared to join that society. So we need to talk about race, the economy, gender roles, cultural values and all kinds of other things. These can't just be things we study. But if teachers are doing all the teaching, and if the Harvard institution is allowed to manage us instead of the other way around, that's all we're going to get.

There are a lot of people on campus working on a lot of good things, dealing with these issues on a variety of fronts. But most of these people rarely cross paths. Many other people aren't involved in this kind of "everyday politics" because there isn't any institutional support on campus to make that involvement easy. There are plenty of things at Harvard designed to occupy your time in other ways--problem sets, final clubs, football games. But there are not enough activities that bring people together across group affiliations as students who have something to say about our education, and about the society which Harvard is supposed to prepare us to enter.

This is our university. We have the right to have a say in how we spend our four years here. We have a right to get as much out of this education as we can, and not to settle for what we're offered. We have a right to make this campus a little less boring by giving people something to think about besides their next response paper or the next a cappella concert.

We're here at college to learn and to prepare for our futures. We should make sure we have an active hand in determining what we get to learn about and in deciding what futures we're being prepared for. And we shouldn't forget to make the most of our time while we're here--by claiming it, and the University, as our own.

Christopher Meckstroth '99 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.