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During my senior year of high school I often took personal time for deep
reflection upon the future, filled with wonder and awe. One quote that I always
remembered is, “There is a time and a place for everything and its called college.” To me
this encapsulated what a transformational time college is, for better and for worse. It is
the last stop before the real world for many graduates, the last chance for an impression
to be made. There is no better time for this transformation to occur in one’s life. College
years are the last bastion for the energy, vitality and naiveté of youth. Without
responsibilities such as a full time job or children, college students have freedom, which
coupled with youth, can produce amazing things.
The benefits of a degree go far beyond professional development, a fact which
colleges have overlooked. The college experience enhances a person economically,
socially, educationally, and personally. This comprises an attractive set of benefits to
students. Colleges ought not to overlook the intersection of all of these, politics and civic
life. Students are pushed to figure out what they want in life and attain it. These school
sponsored goals, however, are boxed inside the current civic environment. Many colleges
do not practice what they preach inside the classroom. Students are taught about
revolutionary thinkers whose ideas and actions changed the world. But try to change a
school policy or way of action and the student meets a familiar enemy, the bureaucracy.
Often referred to as the fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy has taken
over not only our liberal arts colleges but many other public institutions. Bureaucracies,
act as living entities, attempting to ensure their own survival and growth through time.
Most citizen interaction is met with the cool calm of impersonal paperwork. The growth
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of bureaucracies and legal requirements has killed far too many sparks of passion and
ingenuity within the polity.
Citizens have internalized the bureaucracy, leading them to be impersonal and
satisfied with the status quo. The human spark of empathy is being drained out of the
electorate. People need to be re-invigorated with the possibilities that exist outside of the
box. The first step is to reverse the trend of disengagement with society. Aided and
abetted by technology and wealth, the community has been forgotten. Changes must be
made in the framework of our democracy and economy.
It is urgent that the downward spiral of political participation be reversed.
America’s trend towards oligarchy is a root cause of the decline. Government is taking
power when it should be giving it to the people. Citizens must be able to easily change
the environment and community in which they live, which is now not the case. Most
citizens are being squeezed financially as never before. Participation and discussion is not
feasible when one must concentrate on putting food on the table.
Voting takes time, a precious commodity these days. How had the founding
fathers not declared Election Day a holiday? Election Day should be akin to Christmas in
our civil religion. Everyone, from the humble wage laborer to the overworked executive
should be removed of all practical responsibilities for the day. Knowing they would have
dedicated time to vote, citizens would pay more attention to the election. Raising the
salience of politics is an important step to increasing participation. Companies which use
our commonly held airwaves should give back to the public through free airtime for civic
discussion. Free media time for campaigning candidates is only one example, this doubly
serves to remove money from politics are to educate the public.
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Next, the benefits of participating must grow. Again, the enemy is bureaucracy
and complacency. Government inaction must not be accepted. Too often the moneyed,
powerful interests take over political discussion. The winner take all system that we
practice stifles civic participation, giving citizens only two realistic choices. With only
two parties acting as vehicles towards political enfranchisement, competition rather than
cooperation is emphasized in the political system. Political elites, which have added to
the problem by becoming increasingly polarized in recent years, fight against each other
rather than building coalitions and acting for the common good.
A multi party system would allow more ideas to be introduced and acted upon.
Having only two parties, the government is becoming a closed system where
transparency is discouraged for partisan ends. A truly transparent government would
hearten the public by allowing them to see the processes by which decisions are made. A
multi party, transparent government is needed to combat the increasingly oligarchial
government of today. Republicans and Democrats seek to be all inclusive in their appeals,
promising everything and delivering little. Many citizens have mixed political views,
which lead them to self-identify with neither party strongly. Citizens should not be left to
choose between the lesser of two evils. With more political choices, citizens would find
one in which they truly believed, raising the importance and probability of civic action.
The youth are enlivened with the idealism and vitality to act on new ideas. They
must be shown how to form and put civic goals, as they are professional goals, into action.
The college in itself must be made into a laboratory of democracy, not the current model
of educational bureaucracy. Students who reach college have already met the bureaucracy
and know how to live under its rule. They just continue down the same path of civic
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engagement. The college, due its uniqueness as an institution and a self contained society,
should have its threshold for change set far below the government. Students would learn
that not only voting, but political participation in general has low costs and high benefits.
Students should be able to address and change nearly any part of the college
experience with comparative ease. The state of the college today is a constant
disagreement with the administration which students do not waste energy to fight. They
too have internalized that one cannot win against the bureaucracy. The administration
should run the college with the widest amount of possible outcomes available. The
bureaucracy ought not to have a vested interest in certain outcomes, leaving them open to
easy and swift change. The students would then be left to their own devices to determine
the feasibility of gathering the support of students for change.
Students would learn firsthand the process by which changes are made. Changes
could be made by both working either within or outside the parameters of student
government. One reason for student apathy is that no real change happens in the college
when student government changes hands. Their hands are tied up by the educational
bureaucracy. If big changes occurred after each election, students would be more
inclined to participate, knowing they would be affected by the outcome. This would lead
to other forms of political participation, since the importance of the election would
necessitate it.
Policy making bodies should be reformed in the interest of democracy. If
demonstrations, petitions, and civil disobedience were interpreted as a real need for
change and acted upon, students would learn valuable lessons about democracy which
would carry on for the rest of their lives. Political actions, depending on their strength
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and size, should be followed by reactions of policy change by the administration. No
student should ever be disciplined or questioned by security for any form of political
action. Security guards have good memories; holding and acting upon unpopular views
which challenge authority or the bureaucracy may mark a student for extra trouble down
the road.
When preparing for a career, students need to be taught not only the role of
government in their industry, but the role of politics. Following the current political
situation on a weekly basis would allow the cause and effect relationship to become
salient. If a student wants to enter the medical field, the how and why of health policy
should be discussed, from the viewpoints of the political actors involved. Having students
follow topical bills through the legislative process would be very informative. Knowledge
and membership of pertinent interest groups should also be required. If as part of the
curriculum, students were allowed to join an interest group of their choice on the college
bankroll, each student would be inextricably, politically linked with a cause of their
choosing. Students would be driven to participate, now and in the future.
Without participation, our democracy is dead in the water. The electorate has put
far too much trust in our elected leaders, allowing them to watch the farm while they go
off to work. The president has demonstrated this by urging people to go shopping during
wartime. He knows he has a huge threshold to meet and before the media or populace
demand accountability. Even worse, discussion and protest is frowned upon and the
citizen’s patriotism is questioned. If this is not the first step of a journey away from
democracy than what is?