Saturday, December 30, 2006
If committing an act of civil disobedience is a class assignment, is it still an act of civil disobedience?
Never mind such hairsplitting. Definitions these days -- when we can't even decide what to call what's going on in Iraq -- are hard to come by. So we will simply note with pleasure a very unusual experiment -- sort of an organized, for-credit rebellion taking place at Unity College.
That's where professor Kathryn Miles has her students inhabiting the spirits of some of America's greatest thinkers, writers, social critics and disobey-ers, including Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Dr. Martin Luther King and Edward Abbey (the latter, for those of you who don't know because you are too young or were too well-behaved during the 1960s, wrote a classic of environmental incitement called, "The Monkey Wrench Gang").
Miles wants her students to be latter-day monkey-wrenchers (well, not quite; she'd like them to stay within the law) and, after reading the social protest literature of the abovementioned folks, she asks her pupils to identify an issue that's important to them and carry out an act of protest about it. Concerned about the lack of political engagement among today's youth, Miles' credo is that "sitting back and complaining is just not an option."
So her students went out and followed instructions. One built tableaus drawing attention to the glass ceiling at Unity College, including a series of glass windows displayed throughout campus. That one earned its creator a meeting with the college president and a commitment from the school's administrators to brief search committees on the problem.
Other students protested the lack of labeling on genetically engineered food and the number of deaths in the Iraq war.
Miles says she graded her students on effort rather than effectiveness. That's probably a good idea, because from our brief review of world history, we figure it usually takes more than a semester to accomplish major social change.