Protest with Purpose | Denny Rothwell

On September 17, 2011, one thousand people gathered in New York City’s Zuccotti Park to protest the wealth inequality of the United States. Exactly two months later, the NYPD disbanded the last remnants of the Occupy Wall Street movement, clearing Zuccotti Park and the area of OWS influence which stretched into Union Square, Foley Square, and the Brooklyn Bridge. They wanted to stop the greatest social movement The United States had seen in the post-9/11 era. They failed.

To those of us growing up in the shadow of Occupy Wall Street, it might be difficult to remember how monumental it was. It probably didn’t feel like it would direct our social interests or reinvent western culture for a decade (or longer). For that matter, it probably doesn’t feel that way now to most readers, because the changes we experienced were mostly covert, and intentionally so. When I demonstrate just how significant Occupy Wall Street was, however, I suspect most will change their minds. The fallout of OWS was twofold. First, threatened corporations, frightened that the actions of protesters might remove them from power, used advertising alongside economic and political capital to turn the attention of angry young liberals away from economic inequality and towards issues of social justice, particularly concerning race and sexuality. Second, the concept of protest, which had been for decades the domain of extreme leftist splinter groups, once again became palatable to the general American public. If the reader is still unconvinced that this restructured society, remember BLM, #MeToo, the feminism rebrand, and the entire social media platform that was Tumblr.

I was not at Kenyon when everything went down, but I saw the effect Occupy Wall Street had here. Disobedience is a core cultural value at Kenyon, one that eclipses any of the administration’s attempts to curtail it with a student handbook or disciplinary action. In fact, the handbook feels more like a loose guideline than a hard set of rules. How else do we explain the lackadaisical attitude staff has towards the politically charged posters and vandalism that we have all become familiar with? But after I witnessed the most recent example of this phenomenon – posters satirizing Kenyon’s mismanagement of Covid-19 taped to the gates of hell and library mods – I was struck by a question I am sure everyone wonders eventually: how effective is protest at Kenyon, anyway?

I sat down with K-SWOC’s Nick Becker to find out. Becker is a key figure for student outreach at K-SWOC and helped plan their Spring 2021 strike, which he describes as a success. To provide support for his position, Becker argues that K-SWOC “got hundreds of students to march with us.” The purpose of the strike has been too thoroughly examined to justify repeating here, but for the sake of clarification, organized student workers wanted to apply pressure on the Kenyon administration to recognize Kenyon student workers as a union. Due to Trump-era laws, unions cannot receive the protections and privileges guaranteed in federal labor law without recognition from an employer. In this case, that means that Kenyon student workers cannot expect (what most laborers generally agree to be) acceptable wages, reasonable hours, and fair treatment. Becker specifically listed CAs as victims of predatory labor policy at Kenyon, explaining that they “work too many hours and aren’t paid for all of them.” 

But while K-SWOC’s self-evaluation is glowing, the results of the strike aren’t promising. Kenyon still refuses to recognize a student worker union, in spite of all the tactics student workers employed. Becker admitted that “it’s hard to call a strike a success if you don’t get what you want.” Part of the problem is that in the context of Kenyon, a strike is conceptually flawed. The logic of strikes in other industries is that businesses and consumers depend on labor to provide a good or service, so when laborers refuse to do so, the business will fail. In terms of something like air travel, this can have catastrophic political and economic effects and cripple huge corporations. It is in the best interest of most businesses to end strikes as soon as possible, lest they risk bankruptcy. Kenyon is not one of these businesses for two reasons. First, Kenyon does not function in a noticeably different way without student workers. The services student workers provide are not essential; some might even be superfluous. The largest departments at Kenyon are Residential Life, Chalmers Library, The KAC, and student teaching, employing students for jobs that improve comfort for students and staff. Teaching assistants reduce the workload of professors, KenyonFit instructors provide fitness classes for students, Helpline provides support for those experiencing technical difficulties, and while all this is nice, none of it is necessary for Kenyon College to function. Second, and more importantly, Kenyon does not earn money by selling the labor of its workers. The revenue Kenyon earns from tuition and endowment will always far exceed the amount they make by selling services that student workers provide. In fact, most of these services are free; Kenyon loses money by hiring student workers rather than earning it. In this way, the relationship between Kenyon and student workers has more in common with the relationship between man and servant than the relationship between employer and employee.

Student workers have to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth that their labor is not valued very highly because their labor is not very valuable. It doesn’t earn money, and Kenyon operates exactly the same without it, which is why administration doesn’t care if their labor force stops working. This is insulting, I know, but as long as K-SWOC is unwilling to accept that refusal to work is not a viable strategy of noncompliance, they will get nothing done.

Additionally, Kenyon is too accustomed to protest to care. It is no longer shocking or interesting. It’s just a part of everyday life here, one that demands no more attention than a meal at Peirce or a party at the NCAs. In her article “Your Politics are Boring as F**k,” anarchist magazine CrimethInc’s Nadia C argues that “your politics are boring to [the working class] because they really are irrelevant. They know that your antiquated styles of protest — your marches, handheld signs, and gatherings — are now powerless to effect real change because they have become such a predictable part of the status quo.” When we have clubs dedicated to organizing marches and administration platforms them at events like the involvement fair, it’s hard to disagree. Protestors at Kenyon aren’t revolutionary; they’re acting within the bounds of expected behavior for students at Kenyon. And when our protests become so routine, it’s easy to dismiss civil disobedience as no more than a social responsibility. Students engage in protest because they want to project the image of revolutionaries, not because they expect to substantially change the state of affairs at Kenyon.

Unfortunately, the answer to “what forms of protest work at Kenyon?” thus far seems to be “none.” The Kenyon administration is too comfortable in its position of power to listen to student voices because there’s nothing that it wants or needs from students. It simply doesn’t care what posters we paste around campus, or whether student committees disagree with its actions, or even if we strike. Further, it can continue to make terrible choices and demonstrate incompetent leadership because nobody is holding it accountable. It will always receive money from the state, so it is never in any danger. For Kenyon College to reach a point that it actually serves the interests of the student body, it needs to develop a relationship with the student body such that it can be punished when it does wrong. Of course, by its nature, no problem we have at Kenyon will matter to any student here for more than four years. If a student cannot bear the social injustice that long, this might not be the right place for him. In this way, the better answer to “what forms of protest work at Kenyon” might be “why bother protesting at all?”

There is hope on the horizon for K-SWOC, however. With Biden in office, the laws that demanded Kenyon recognize a student worker union to get legal protections are likely to be overturned. Becker, a political science major, is confident they will. That means that if enough student workers organize, they can form a union and receive the same privileges as unions in other industries across the United States. Soon, K-SWOC might not need to strike at all.

The conclusion I reached through my research is that protest needs purpose to be effective. There are generally three traits that effective protests share and ineffective ones lack: 1) The protestors want to implement a specific, immediate change; 2) The change that protestors want to implement has a meaningful and positive impact on the lives of the protestors; 3) The protestors have the natural right to implement the change or to have it implemented by others if they cannot.

Readers might at first be confused that this list does not address the actual tactics used. It is intuitive that authorities would be more responsive to protests when failure to meet the protestor’s demands has negative consequences, the most obvious example of which is violence. However, I ask those readers to consider examples of violent protests. The most extreme one is terrorism. Al-Qaeda killed three thousand people when they wanted to end U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, and it not only failed, it backfired tenfold, starting a war that would only increase American hegemony in the Middle East (which is still full of U.S. puppets despite our exit from Afghanistan). The most successful example of protest in the United States is also among the most peaceful: the civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This movement had all of the traits featured above. Protestors wanted something specific (the abolition of Jim Crow laws) which had a tangible effect on their lives and which fell within the bounds of their human rights. The turnaround from the 1963 March on Washington to the passage of the Civil Rights Act was less than a year, and there can be little doubt that the protestors’ strategy was at least partially responsible for that. Contrast this with the actions of Malcolm X or the Black Panthers, directionless rage which accomplished very little. I am not a sociologist, so even though I can confirm that the traits above are more important than methodology, I can only speculate why they are more important. I suspect the difference is that forceful protest leads authorities to react with fear or anger, which usually leads them to take an offensive stance against protestors, whereas purposeful protests engage authorities in rational thought, enabling them to implement change when it is reasonable.

This is true at Kenyon as well. Resistance here usually fails because it is not purposeful. The posters with which students have grown familiar advocate for no change and make no real argumentation on their own. Unless they are accompanied by more substantial action, they are just students lashing out. It is rebellion for the sake of rebellion. K-SWOC is more purposeful than that, but they are not all the way there. First, while forming a union certainly is a concrete goal, to what end they are forming the union ought to be clearer. They need to identify the specific legal support that would end labor law violations to prove that the union would actually help workers. Otherwise, the union would be pointless. Second, they have to prove the value of their labor. The strike was an attempt at this, but it failed because Kenyon (for the most part) operated normally even without student workers. To prove that student workers are entitled to a union and that asking for a union is within their natural rights, K-SWOC must demonstrate that it makes more sense for Kenyon to employ unionized workers than not to hire student workers at all. I do not think K-SWOC will listen to my suggestions. I argued several times throughout this article that they’ve made errors in their approach, and I expect they’ll be too offended by that to consider what I have to say. However, I would not offer suggestions at all if I did not want them to succeed. Kenyon is a deeply flawed institution, but its greatest flaw is not the incompetent leadership. Kenyon’s greatest flaw is its unwillingness to adapt or listen to the student body, compounding every mistake it makes by digging its heels in and insisting that worsening the experience for students here is the right choice. The state of Kenyon’s operations are not currently acceptable, but students have proven that they are incapable of effecting change with their current tactics. So here is the call to action: quit the aimless rebellion. Start protesting with purpose.