[This post was written by Megan Rice and Angelina Peters and complements previous students’ analysis of the question What is Sustainability?]
This title of this post is not in reference to a toddler being told to go to bed for the hundredth time. Rather, we assert that the title should be the cry among many university and college students. When did our higher learning institutions become the 1984 versions of Big Brother? With the criticism and failure of No Child Left Behind or President Obama’s Race to the Top, why are our universities and colleges abandoning academics for activism?
More telling is why, when we went to the Department of Education’s web link to both the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs, the pages were under construction?!?! These programs purport to help ensure our children are receiving a proper education (whatever that means to you or better yet your elected official). Therefore, if we are enacting laws, cutting funding to poorly-performing schools, and firing teachers who fail to educate our children, what injustice is happening at the university level. As a supporters of publicly-funded universities, all tax payers should want to know how tax money is being spent.
So what is the problem?
Could it be that many of the academic leaders are products of the 1960s revolution and hold fast to the mantra of “fighting the man?” Is the new generation’s addiction to technology making them complacent? Who knows the answers, but the question should be, when did we trade our rights to an academic education for a tree-hugging chain? More importantly, when did we give up free will to be told what we should believe in and how we should participate in change?
There is nothing wrong with being an advocate or an activist, and we encourage both. When people find something to be so passionate about as to stand out in a hurricane to protect it—that is amazing. This week we read an article by Ashley Thorne, titled “Beating the Apple Tree: How Universities Coerce Activism.”[1] We wanted to beat something after reading this article, but the apples are ready to harvest.
When universities forget their place, everyone suffers. Is it important for university professors and administrators to instill activism and advocacy within their student body? Of course! However, if it means changing courses to meet these needs then we have a problem.
The problem isn’t that activism doesn’t work, it is that it should not be forced upon the student body like a religion, and students should be able to choose for themselves what they will believe. Social change is much more acceptable and just as effective. For example, at Portland State University there is a movement to increase recycling and it is catching on! If you are the only student in your classroom without a reusable water bottle then you stand out. Social change is needed if we want a sustainable future and a sustainable future is needed! To change the social environment in which we are used to helps lead to positive and obtainable outcomes; however, pushing radical activism to get students involved is unsustainable.
What if one disagrees with the university’s version of activism?
One might tell those who disagree, “You can just move!” If one does not like it, one should find somewhere else more conducive to my beliefs.
Doesn’t that mantra sound familiar. The point is we’re not paying for our education to be told what to believe. We’re fine with learning new things and coming out of our comfort zones, but when our education is forced upon us with the threat of not obtaining our degrees, then we have a problem. Universities and colleges exist to help students expand their minds and to allow students to express their opinions in a encouraging environment. However, when entire academic programs are shifted to follow the Chancellor or Presidents’ social agenda then we have a problem with university-controlled advocacy.
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[1] Ashley Thorne, “Beating the Apple Tree: How the University Coerces Activism,” Academic Questions 23 (2010), 212-224.
Sustainability History Project 
Thought-provoking discussion here, as is Thorne’s article. My primary question in reading Thorne is to wonder how prevalent is the pattern she finds in other college & university settings? In particular, I would like to learn about students’ lived experience here at Portland State. What examples are there of the faculty or administration pushing a strict, top-down initiative to force an activist approach among students and squelch dissent? We had this discussion in class and I don’t recall that students had any specific examples from PSU, but I’m always open to hearing such evidence.
My interpretation of Thorne’s article is that she’s painting with a rather broad brush and has chosen a handful of outliers to serve as her evidence; these outliers might be interesting, but I’m not at all convinced that they add up to much.
Given the selective and cursory treatment of her evidence, I’m also not convinced that she presented all of the relevant details. For example, upon reading the case of Bill Felkner (pp.215-216), I wondered if the reason that he received a failing grade for that assignment was because he simply did not do what he was assigned. If the assignment was to exercise his critical thinking skills by writing in support of a bill that he personally opposed, then the assignment could have been about him “playing devil’s advocate,” and not at all concerned about what his true beliefs were. This is a perfectly valid type of assignment, and can help students appreciate complexity by seeing more than one side of any given issue. If the assignment called for this approach, and he did not complete the assignment as assigned, then he deserved his failing grade — and this could have nothing at all to do with him “internalizing” one ideological perspective or another. However, Thorne does not consider this possibility, nor provide enough evidence for readers to determine if this was, in fact, the case.
Here at PSU, I have not experienced, to any degree, the pattern Thorne describes, but I’m eager to learn about specific, evidence-based examples where this pattern has been true at PSU.