Northwestern students, you gave up your right to vote a long time ago.
Not your legal right — that still exists. Despite Evanston City Council’s recommendation not to splinter the student vote, you still have proved your right to vote is not worth protecting.
History is filled with groups that have been wrongfully denied suffrage. But unlike students, those groups had one thing in common: They cared. To overcome an injustice they proved they had a voice worth hearing.
This is not the case with NU students, and it is not surprising that some aldermen attempted to discount the student voting bloc. Why shouldn’t they?
It’s not even that NU students don’t vote — a hurdle Associated Student Government leaders have said they faced in the redistricting debate, although Federal Election Commission records do show some 20 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds vote. And yes, only a combined 335 students voted in the two on-campus precincts in the 2002 election.
The problem is that NU students have acted so apathetically that, as a whole, no one really cares what they have to say anymore. Although some individual students certainly break the mold, there is no significant organized political activism at this campus.
Take some of the student groups that could be representing these students. One of the most active groups on many college campuses right now is the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. At NU there is Rainbow Alliance, a fine organization for reaching out to students who are coming to terms with their sexuality, which also provides some quality programming. But that’s about it.
The group had its National Coming Out Day celebration last month, but it was easy to miss. That’s probably not the case at places like the University of California at Los Angeles, where a same-sex couple got married to round out the weeklong celebration there. How about the Marriage Protection Week that President Bush innaugurated the week after? NU students weren’t out protesting like students at Purdue University.
The lack of political involvement by Rainbow Alliance is not a surprise, though. The group does not even have someone to fill their activism chair position. It probably should not be a surprise either that the LGBT Resource Center more resembles — ironically — a closet than a center.
The group shouldn’t shoulder all of the blame. A lack of outside involvement is also a hindrance to For Members Only, which has been one of the most responsive groups to the racial and ethnic graffiti that has plagued campus since last year. The black student group has worked to build consensus with student groups that represent other minorities. They have come up with a lot of good ideas, including a change to the student handbook. But it was mainly members of the other minority groups that participated.
On a few occasion, NU has proved this assumption wrong. There was the large outcry against building over the Lagoon and Women’s Coalition did work to lobby the university for better on-campus lighting after a spate of assaults Spring Quarter 2002. One might even lump in the people who camped out at the University Library until NU joined the Worker Rights Consortium.
But it’s hardly a trend. There doesn’t seem to be anybody celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Nor were there any NU students joining the Immigrant Workers Freedom Rides that took place this fall and drew the support of many people, especially Latinos, on college campuses.
But NU students need to learn that signing a petition, attending a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech or taking Gay and Lesbian History does not make them political. It means they feel guilty.
Student groups do a lot of good work both in programming and philanthropy on campus. If that’s the school NU wants to be, that’s fine. But don’t be surprised when no one cares what students have to say.
