Students who seek to create a more just, more compassionate world should do so with Dartmouth’s growing student movements.
This article is featured in the 2022 Freshman special issue.
There is a long history of Dartmouth students organizing for a peaceful, just world, from the Green jobs against the College’s investments in apartheid South Africa to the Indigenous protests of 1993 against Dartmouth’s support of Hydro-Quebec’s dams on Cree Land. This legacy continues: Students working in the cafeteria with Dartmouth’s Student Worker Collective negotiated for gains beyond universal sick pay and a 1.5x pay rise, and the student coalitions of Black under the Black Student Congress faces constant underfunding and racism. If you are a student who believes in a better world and wants to be a part of shaping it, joining student organizations on campus is the best way to do so. Organizing creates student power, but also offers spaces of strength and hope for the future — spaces that can and should be pursued with the energy of new students.
Scholar-revolutionary Angela Davis wrote: “I want to feel that there is a great community of people who share the same vision of the future.” It is the actions of Dartmouth that allow us to feel the glimpses of that community, of that loving anger. As I entered my fourth year at Dartmouth, half of my experience felt like painted chaos. From the twin COVID-19 and monkeypox pandemics to endless economic insecurity to the pain of environmental disaster, getting out of bed every morning has become a Herculean task.
But organizing offers us new solutions, visions of possibility that suggest this is not our future. Nothing keeps me going more than fellow students, here and around the world, who refuse a world defined by casual cruelty – students who, as a part of many and united movements, organized against the prison industrial complex to exploit workers, from the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign to the Youth Democratic Socialists of America’s Red Hot Summer program that taught hundreds of university students across the country the foundations of youth labor environment. Organizing at Dartmouth connects you to these movements and to other students fighting the good fight.
It also shows us that we are our own best way out. When the onset of the pandemic left students devastated and stranded financially and socially, there was anger and hopelessness in response to the College. To meet the dire need on campus, the Dartmouth Student Union arose, creating a mutual aid fund which facilitate networks of care so that students can afford to live. But in doing so, it does more than that. It promotes a future free of capital and its exploitation; as students, we don’t receive the value we give to the school, and the only thing we have is each other. As students rush back to campus as COVID-19 continues, Dartmouth’s Student Worker Collective will put deep pressure to the College to pay fair wages and provide sick pay to student workers.
But not only do these organizations offer students material gains, they are also important ideological spaces for political discussion and learning, such as DSU’s Freedom Schools of abolitionist justice in Miami and Dartmouth YDSA’s crash courses in Marx in relation to the strike wave. In learning about these international movements, and acquiring the vocabulary to discuss them and what we can learn from them in Hanover, New Hampshire, we develop the ability to connect these movements to our own struggles. and experiences. Learning, for example, how past students organized against mass death and economic exploitation allowed me to connect my current work, from SWCD to militarism in Korea, to international movements.
I am not writing to prove that there are crises, but to know that they are happening, and we can still dream. I, and others, are asking students entering Dartmouth, or even students who want to join but are unsure, lost or cynical, to join a strong student movement – to refuse passivity, and finding joy and love in what is possible. Angela Davis ended her quote with this: “So let me close today with a simple, final message which is a plea. Please get involved. Please try to make a difference. Please try to turn this country, and the world, back to around.” People here welcome you with open arms if you do, and it’s a choice that makes your time here more transformative than you can imagine.