Your fellow students are ready to listen. Northwestern students are taking a new approach to campus engagement and community-building, taking it to the streets to listen to students’ real concerns. Rather than assume they can create “one Northwestern” from scratch with purple t-shirts or directly engage their fellow students with fancy buzzwords, the listening campaign will hopefully bring what the student organizers promise – a frank dialogue about NU’s problems and their potential solutions.
The NU Listening Campaign was born from a Northwestern Community Development Corps-sponsored organizer’s training held April 17-18. President Barack Obama’s campaign gave community organizing “a new kind of sexy appeal” – the NU organizers’ training attempted to tap into that enthusiasm and energy. Equipped with the tools and the desire to affect change, six students decided to assess the most salient issues and problems of the NU community and then – hopefully – try to lobby the administration and other decision makers to fix them.
As a coalition of a number of student groups, including NCDC, Organized Action by Students Invested in Society, Students for Ecological and Environmental Development, College Democrats and Students for Obama, the results of Northwestern Listening Campaign will not be limited to a certain subsection of NU’s population. Last week’s barrage of listserv e-mails from every which corner of campus can attest to that.
Furthermore, NCDC’s involvement will bring another dimension to the initiative. While the volunteer corps’ primary agenda is service in the Evanston and Chicago communities, NCDC can do its part for the NU community itself. By turning inward, NCDC can put its scores of student volunteers to use and will likely help cultivate a student body that will be more inclined to community service in the future.
As incoming President Morton Schapiro assumes his role in that spacious office in the Rebecca Crown Center, there will undoubtedly be a number of student leaders and organizations jockeying for his attention. If the NU listening campaign is effective, its recommendations should be high on his agenda.
When the listening campaign’s report hits his desk next year – or reaches his e-mail in the coming months – what might it say? What might it reflect about us, where we are and where we intend to be?
Diversity will be a big issue. So will a new Norris. Better food in the dining halls, universal Internet access, more SafeRides could all come up, too.
The survey strives to answer some more nebulous questions, and with good reason: What are our values and passions? What does each student have to offer? How can each student make an impact? The survey could go a long way to address our deep-seated issues with the administration – by teasing out what each student can offer, the administration can make us feel more like valued students than numbers in a ledger, more like human beings than chips to be shuffled from one dorm to another.
Let’s hope that this listening campaign is that and more – not a forced attempt at engagement, but an effort to reach out and make a real impact in the here and now.
– MATT SPECTORCampus EditorCommunication junior Matt Spector can be reached at [email protected].
