Ray Whitehouse/The Daily Northwesern
Alan Maas, Medill ’85, Anti-Apartheid Alliance member, former DAILY staffer and current editor of the Socialist Worker, talks about the challenges of campus activism and his work as an editor before his appearance on a Students Against War and Occupation panel on Thursday.
Daily: What’s the state of campus activism today?
Alan Maas: You’re going to see more of it going along. In the 1980s, it was a pretty conservative period. I think that conservatism had the initiative in a lot of ways. The Anti-apartheid movement was the exception in a lot of ways, to what remained smaller groups of people, trying to figure out how they could mobilize themselves…. Now, you have not only the war, but other issues that affect people in their lives, and I’ve seen, working on The Socialist Worker, a lot more of a sense of people coming together to try and grapple with what to do about budget cuts, tuition increases and financial aid.
D: What’s the biggest challenge for campus activism today?
AM: Some of it comes from being only in the beginning of a “Yes We Can,” “Sí Se Puede” sort of confidence…. We’re only at the beginning of that kind of period, so there’s not much of a sense of what’s possible, of what the people that came before did. In the 1980s, during the period of Reaganism, it was still only a generation’s time back to the big struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, so we knew where to look to find out what to do in order to go about mobilizing. I think the sentiment is there, but maybe not the nuts and bolts of organizing. That’s something I think is down to every individual doing it, to take the step forward to build toward something larger.
D: You serve as the editor of The Socialist Worker. Do you think there is a downside to working with a publication that has a particular agenda in that the other side maybe rejects your thoughts out of hand?
AM: We’ve been taught in journalism for so long this idea that there is objective journalism, which doesn’t take sides, and then there are these beatnik papers like The Socialist Worker, and they’re separated. My sense is that there are ways that objective journalism isn’t so objective. You’re taught if you’re covering health care reform, you have to look at the liberal side of things and the conservative side of things, but that conceals the ways in that there’s a very narrow range of opinions that are allowed on the question. The idea that I work for an opinion newspaper, as opposed to a newspaper that is more objective, conceals the way that a more objective newspaper actually holds opinions, just ones that are more agreeable to the status quo.
D: Are you experiencing the same problems that larger publications are having in terms of dealing with the Internet?
AM: The Socialist Worker’s not a real profit-making operation. A lack of advertising revenue has never affected us…. I’m torn about the questions about the future of journalism. The new layoffs at the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Reader mean that people (like Steve Mills and Ken Armstrong, who wrote about the death penalty in Illinois a few years back) don’t have the same access to resources they need (for) investigative journalism…. In terms of the independent media…just in the support of our readers, we’re going to find the way to carry on. In some ways the Internet, because it’s free, has helped us. I know it’s helped expand our reach.
