As this term progresses, many of the usual routines of the year are fast returning to focus. Due dates are beginning their slow, inexorable evolution from abstractions printed on syllabi to concrete time commitments and nights of lost sleep. Libraries are, again, beginning to fill with students, and class schedules are now set in the stone of the Minerva menu.
One of the things that has not come back with such speed is student politics, and for this we should be thankful. Sure, we’ve once again been subjected to the tiresome debate over whether frosh is an incubator of racist, patriarchal rape culture, but in general, the mood around campus is pretty calm compared to this time last year, when the MUNACA strike was giving campus opinion pages more than enough fiery rhetoric to work with.
And so, in this time of calm, I thought it would be useful to examine one of the main streams of thought that runs through the ranks of the more politically-minded on campus. There’s a prevailing view that involvement in student politics—and only on one ideological side—is not simply one of many perfectly legitimate and fulfilling uses of time, but an action that is on a higher moral plane than any other.
Before we look closely at this phenomenon, let me unequivocally announce that there is no moral virtue to campus politics. The stakes of most political debates on campus are astonishingly small; a student café here, a symbolic condemnation there, and even in the cases where they are not—as in the cases I will discuss—the issues are complex, morally ambiguous matters of economics and politics that students have a perfect right not to care about. Simply paying tuition at this institution does not obligate one to attend a General Assembly, and the low turnout at most of these events is a very democratic demonstration of people voting with their feet, and with their time.
We start our look back with the MUNACA strike. Anyone reading campus media immediately after the strike began would have been besieged with exhortations to join a labour action that “ideologically parallels students’ struggles against tuition hikes and austerity measures.” (McGill Daily, Sept 8., 2011) Such language made clear a moral implication. To not support MUNACA wasn’t simply a decision to ignore or reach a different conclusion on the merits of a labour dispute. Rather, it was a decision to turn one’s back on a critical front in some sort of social justice struggle.
The turn to winter and the spectre of the provincial student strike merely served to raise the volume of such moralizing. A group attempting to put forth a strike vote in the Faculty of Science argued, in an open letter, that “being politically neutral does not mean withdrawing from a situation, but, rather, being inactive when injustices are committed.” The writers went on to proclaim that university students have a “duty” to engage in their politics, which in their case, meant voting for the strike.
And engage in politics students did, packing the AUS to vote on the strike, just as they were exhorted to—again, as a moral obligation—by activist forces on campus. There, the script took an unexpected turn, and students narrowly rejected the strike motion. Suddenly, the rhetoric changed. Participating in campus politics was not a sign of an advanced political consciousness or a deeper understanding of global injustice. Instead, the decision was seen as merely a temper tantrum of a privileged majority at McGill. A student columnist in the days afterward went as far to argue that a minimum quorum passage of the strike vote would have been better than “McGill students being unusually politicized for six hours.”
This reveals the contradiction at work. It would be bad enough if these ideologues viewed any participation in campus politics as morally superior to doing other things, but it seems only participation on a particular side is virtuous. Those who would organize from somewhere closer to the political mainstream are “destructive,” as was said of last year’s QPIRG opt-out campaign.
On some level, this is unsurprising. When you approach the world from the sort of stark, good vs. evil viewpoint that would make Rumsfeld and company proud, it’s pretty easy to see anything less than strident advocacy in your favor as a grievous moral lapse. As the political skirmishes of this year begin to shape up, it would be instructive to see if we will again be subjected to these sanctimonious appeals.
So profound…
The title of this article is longer than ModPAC’s list of achievements… And members.
Defeating strike mandates across McGill and electing a sensible SSMU exec… yeah I guess you’re right, the title is longer.
hahaha yes, and I’m sure that was all due to the miraculous efforts of BS, Harmon Moon, and Beni Fisch (you mad guys?). Shooting fish in the rich barrel that is McGill…
how much does your father make, Davide?
this is crap
Isn’t it just a bit funny that you arrive at the conclusion that stark moral dichotomies are bad by painting an us vs. them narrative around mainstream and radical politics?
I have a feeling what you’re talking about has yet to leave our campus yet I hope they’re be much less of it. I can remember the AUS Strike Vote like it was yesterday and would rather not have to relive that again…
Are you really defending apathy?…. Labour disputes (including MUNACAs), student disputes and general assemblies are a matter of social justice. Mobilising students can make a huge political difference and if this past year isn’t enough evidence of that for you, then please by all means stay under the rock you’ve been living in.
I am in every way liberal minded and I gotta say this article is right on point. Well done.
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Even at the primitive level, we organize ourselves to be governed by others. So yes, there is a moral imperative to politics.
“Student politics” is ridiculous. A bunch of kids whining about non-issues. Moreover, as you have said, on this campus it is forbidden to be politically passionate unless you are on the left; anyone else is considered “brainwashed” or just “ignorant”. I got into the same top-level uni you did, I spend every waking moment reading, I DO care deeply about REAL politics (not student politics) and yet magically, I am not on the left. Yet every time I am in the library trying to study, I am subjected to some lemming or another talking loudly to her friends about the uncontroversial thesis that “conservatives are stupid”. Frustrating.
Your comment about “good versus evil” I found interesting. It is my personal belief that those who deny the existence of true evil are those who have never had the misfortune to stare it in the face. Moral relativism is the death of mankind.