ABOUT THE RAISE YOUR VOICE CAMPAIGN:
Recent History of Student Action and Engagement
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Conventional measurements of student engagement don’t tell the whole story:
• Voting by 18 – 25 year olds has dropped dramatically from 42% in 1972 (when 18 year olds first got the right to vote) to 28% in the 2000 election.
• Young people read the newspaper less frequently, rarely attend public meetings, seldom work for political campaigns, and almost never run for political office.
• In twelve different areas of civic life identified by Harvard researcher Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, participation by young adults has declined by an average of about 50% since the early 1970’s.
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America’s students are more active in the nation’s communities than ever before, yet are typically seen as disengaged, apathetic, and self-centered. One reason for this misperception is the narrow way “youth civic engagement” is often defined. This narrow definition measures civic engagement with conventional indicators, such as participation in traditional political activities with voting as the simple measure of participation.
In a sharp contrast to this sense of alienation and pessimism, a group of student activists meeting at the Wingspread Conference Center in the spring of 2001 claimed that the civic engagement of today’s students simply is not well understood. This national Campus Compact symposium resulted in The New Student Politics: The Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement (2002). The New Student Politics looks at civic engagement in the 21st century as being much more complex and intricate than in the past and suggests that old measurements of civic engagement are inadequate for understanding the diverse world of a global society in which identity politics plays an ever larger role.
The New Student Politics is suggestive about the multiple connections between “service” and “politics” which may be largely due to the fact that in the past decade, hundreds of thousands of
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“The good news is that students care a great deal (about the day-to-day issues that confront the country). The bad news is that the younger generation can be even more cynical than the present generation about the way the political system operates and far more pessimistic about their ability to change the situation for the better.”
(Creighton and Harwood, College Students Talk Politics)
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students have been involved in local community building activities, offering direct service, learning first hand about a number of critical social issues and becoming involved in grassroots community development efforts. Students at the Wingspread meeting were deeply involved personally in activities that contribute to the public good and very optimistic that their efforts would bring about positive change. The group continued to have a very ambivalent attitude about conventional political engagement activities and the use of political advocacy as a means of change. Many, however, described an emerging trend toward “service politics” in which political activism is connected with service work in communities.
Students at Wingspread saw their service not as an alternative to politics, but as an alternative politics, an alternative form of citizen-political activity which only sometimes connected to conventional politics.
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