Students have one great weapon to change Northwestern: The ability to annoy administrators incessantly. After years of arguing new programs and policies, I have come to realize that campus action is like mutating a species. It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of whether you want to speed up the process by dousing it with radiation.
Campus leaders: Your voices, your meetings and your organizations are the radiation that mutates this campus. And when I say mutate, I mean it in the best possible way. After all, I’m glad to have a cerebral cortex. You can’t always pick when and exactly how your mutation is going to come into fruition, but if you throw enough radiation at the university, it’s going to sprout wings eventually.
The best example is Martin Luther King Day. For years students argued in a variety of ways for a suspension of classes and increased programming: a day on, not a day off. We received muted smiles and grave concerns about logistics and students taking a “ski weekend.”
But now the university appears to have made a 180. I commend the leadership and initiative that University President Henry Bienen and Provost Larry Dumas have taken on this issue. But if it wasn’t for a lot of well-meaning political student radiation, no one would be talking about a change today.
Sometimes, the radiation is unintentional. The haste in making the university’s conversation public must have had something to do with all the terrible press that our old friend Arthur Butz provided. While he intended the sort of radiation that leaves little children with birth defects, we got a cancer therapy of diversity instead. Sorry, Arty.
Once you throw your radiation out there, you can’t always tell what it’s going to do. It’s good that Butz’s revisionist cancer didn’t spread, but it’s always possible for a well-meaning dose of radiation to leave you with a tumor. When I was ASG academic vice president, I casually mentioned that we could improve CTEC responses by making them mandatory. It happened a few weeks later. Although I probably had little influence, I still hid under tables at the very mention of “CTEC.”
With a cogent plan, you can start the important process of bugging administrators constantly. Knowing what you’re talking about also helps you keep the fight alive. The university’s lead shield against student radiation is time. We’re only here for four years and the big struggles take longer than that. But powerful, logical arguments will keep future students fighting for your cause.
That’s what happened with MLK Day. A little bit of luck and a lot of radiation therapy finally led to a change. A year ago, everyone in the administration, and many student leaders, thought that a suspension of classes was a distant possibility at best. We had made the arguments over and over. They seemed to be going nowhere. But look at us now.
It just goes to show, all you have to do is be a little radioactive.
Prajwal Ciryam is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].
