Artist Statement

This multigenre essay examines the relationship between student activism and student apathy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison through current campus events, personal and professional surveys of student activity, and examples of student life. It is an essay documentary exploring the approach of centralized student action groups, and their counterpart, widespread student apathy. This essay challenges the public awareness approach that cause-oriented organizations take, and it investigates the intentional blind eye that students turn toward social and political expressions.

UW-Madison students are daily bombarded by the messages of committees, organizations, and affiliations exercising their right to free speech, but at what point do these authentic causes lose urgency due to students’ growing apathy toward all of the noise of a liberal arts campus? The public hyperactivism creates some fervor, some followers, and some awareness, but there is another large group of students who become immune to the voices and apathetic toward the causes. This is problematic because the more we are inundated with urgent, dramatic problems, the more we become desensitized to legitimate issues in our country and cease to be a progressive community.

There is a plethora of evidence supporting the existence of activism on campus; there is a collaborative for almost any assembly, minority, or problem in America—and many supporting global issues. The problem is not in opportunity or accessibility of social or political need either: the fruitlessness of activists on campus derives from the multitude of messages, all presented in nearly the same fashion, that hit young adults like advertising campaigns. A few go out and buy into the product, and the rest remain skeptical and unaffected. When social problems are emphasized as products, with corporate backing and banners and finances, it is unsurprising that students tighten the purse strings and feel unsympathetic.

This essay is a response to the springtime explosion of booths, banners, demonstrations, and giveaways that pop up after winter has boxed many them from library mall. Fall and spring are the prime times to catch students and offer them free food, drinks, tote bags, stickers, and swag in return for a couple of bucks, a signature, or some ‘raised awareness.’ Students find themselves forced into this rhetorical situation daily, often feeling the pressure and guilt of organizations trying to enlighten them through their right to free speech.

I chose an assembly of protest photos and a personal narrative/handouts to elucidate the social dilemma that students are physically faced with day to day. True examples more succinctly communicate how ubiquitous these messages and .org groups are and put the reader in an empathetic frame of mind. They also explore both sides of the rhetoric war—those students fervently fighting for causes and those passively passing them up, either impervious to the various exigencies or annoyed by their persistent nature. These true, very recent examples show, rather than tell, how widespread and varying activism is. Simultaneously, they compare how similar each organization’s approach to communication and fundraising is. In fact, at first glance most seem almost identical except for the different colors of paper used to catch the eye.

The two news articles, one local and one national, are logical appeals to the ethics of activism, and each demonstrates the irony of campus activists. First, in the local article about the Holocaust controversy in The Badger Herald (“The University of Wisconsin’s Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969”), over a hundred students exercise their right of free speech—by publicly protesting—in order to limit the free speech of someone else—another group’s freedom of the press. It is ironic that one particular attitude is demonstrating to stop another attitude’s demonstrations. It is a case where free speech is exercised in order to stop free speech. The second article, which examines a U.C.L.A. study of student apathy in the United States, argues that students are no more apathetic today than in the Sixties. However, it ironically ends by conceding that student activism is spread thin, non-collaborative, and generally too small to make quantitatively significant changes. Though its purpose is to persuade readers that students do, actively want to make the world a better place, it concludes by recognizing that individual, issue-specific groups are achieving little real progress.

The tragic irony of activism is that, while it succeeds in making copies and putting up tables year after year, together all of these different movements contribute to general campus apathy toward social and political issues. Students walk past the conglomeration of signs and flyers without stopping to read even one. If they happen to catch a message on a sidewalk they do not pause to remember it or write it down. Maybe they will listen if they are given something free, and in return they give their attention and awareness, for free. But how effective is this exchange at solving problems, changing lives, or teaching students about problems in the world? I cannot help but suspect all this fundraising is spent to perpetuate fundraising. I cannot help but sympathize with students who feel that their dollar is just another tiny part of a budget devoted to poster printing and an exaggerated belief in the power of awareness. If we were aware, they suppose we would do something. But maybe we are aware, and just don’t care to contribute.