On any given day you are bound to find some sort of table outside the EMU imploring you to vote “Yes On 97,” sign a petition to save bees or join the libertarian party. These tables are run by students who believe in a cause and spend their time and energy rallying support for their issue.
If you are like me you usually pass them by without much thought, consumed with the next assignment due or in a rush to get to class. It’s not always easy to be engaged and stay informed as you try to balance the responsibilities of student life. Amidst the rat race you can easily lose sight of the role we can play in our democracy and the power we have as members of the university community.
This lack of engagement and political action at UO is troublesome to someone who knows a thing or two about getting people’s attention, Art Pearl.
At age 94, Pearl has a long history of bucking the trends and creating spaces for the unheard to make themselves known. Over his more than half a century long career in academia, Pearl has taught on university campuses from coast to coast and always worked to empower the powerless.
I recently met with Pearl, his son Danny Pearl and UO Ph.D. Kevin Bourgault, and talked with them about the issues they feel undermine civic engagement and political activism on campus.
Pearl longs for the political activism and protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s that propelled the civil rights movement and ended the Vietnam War. Back then campus was more “alive,” Pearl said. It worries him that the spirit of engagement and spaces for political debate no longer define the campus experience.
“There has to be some places on campus where students meet, where they discuss, where there’s debate going on,” Pearl said. He lamented, “where are the people campaigning? You don’t see tables outside on campus and it’s right before a presidential election.”
Pearl traces this lack of civic engagement to primary education that trains students to pass tests and meet standards, rather than become an active and engaged citizen. “Students themselves have had no opportunity to ever develop their citizen responsibility, they’ve gone through 12 years where the only thing they did was take tests,” Pearl said. “There’s no discussion, there’s no opportunity for them.
“That’s the whole goal of the educational process,” Pearl said. “You do what you’re told, as compared to being prepared to take on a leadership role.”
The academic paradigm of students as test takers, rather than critical thinkers and citizens, must be subverted in order for our generation to recapture the political process and begin building a future that works.
If and when we are ready to engage in the political process, there is good news for us members of the so-called “millennial generation”: As of this presidential election we are the largest living generation in the United States, according to Pew Research Center’s David Fry.
With our electoral power and unprecedented access to information, our generation has the potential to create new outcomes and in Pearl’s words, “invent the future.”
But we are not without obstacles of our own. We have to find jobs in a world of automation where we lose work to machines by design. We are confronted with an economic system setup for and controlled by corporations that presides over the highest income inequality levels since the 1920s. We have access to an unlimited amount of media and a constant online audience to share even our most mundane moments with. We have to imagine peace in a time when many undergraduates can hardly remember not being at war.
The challenge of creating a world that works for all of us amidst the uncertainty of changing technologies and a changing climate is a tall-order, but we have to engage like our lives depend on it — they do.
Crafting a future we can live with means we have to talk to each other, create space for debate and challenge structures and narratives of power. The more time we spend each day asking people how they are and caring about what they are doing, the stronger our bonds become and the more vibrant our community will be.
Our time spent on campus is an opportunity not just to figure out where and how we fit into a puzzle, but to create a puzzle of our own by piecing together solutions that create better futures.