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Students educate themselves at Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In

by Timothy Horras, Tent State University/SDS, Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ

(Note: Please visit piratecaucus.blogspot.com for the extended article)

When Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society held a Teach-In on the Iraq war, we attempted to make the form of the event correspond to our core principles. Most anti-war events on the Rutgers campus have followed a consistent pattern: organizers would pick and invite an "expert" on some aspect of Iraq, then raise the requisite amount of money the speaker demanded. The speaker would come to campus, lecture the students, often be feted on the organizers' tab, and then with a hearty thanks would be on his or her merry way.

At some point, organizers with Tent State/SDS became aware that this arrangement was in apparent contradiction to our egalitarian and democratic principles. We sat down together and thought of how we could make our event more participatory, democratic, and populist, and we arrived at a few innovative ideas:

The first element with which we sought to infuse revolutionary democracy into the Teach-In was through the use of surveys. The surveys asked students to prioritize what they most wanted to know about the conflict in Iraq by asking open-ended questions. Students' answers were then to be compiled and used as a guide to prioritize the research and the presentation to be done.

The use of the questionnaires was a highly successful way of engaging with students. Using the survey went hand-in-hand with our motto of "organize everywhere," which we took seriously, surveying students wherever we could find them: in the dorms, in the lecture halls, in the cafeteria, in the lounge - anywhere organizers could reach their classmates.

The questionnaires functioned as a useful organizing tool all of the following ways: 1) it gave organizers an excuse to engage students in a conversation about the war, 2) it allowed them to discuss the war in a very non-threatening, non-confrontational manner, 3) it created a perception of Tent State/SDS organizers as friendly, approachable, and actually concerned with the students' opinions, and 4) it put to lie once and for all the hoary canard, a mantra of bad activists everywhere, that young people are apathetic.

Once we had figured out the questions students had, we had to go about figuring out the answers. When we started the school year and began organizing for the Teach-In, we realized that our team was made up of less than half a dozen activists without any experience organizing whatsoever.

In this situation it would have been much easier for us to raise some money, invite a guest lecturer and focus on agitating for the event. But while collective research and participatory planning made our event in line with our democratic principles, refusing to have outside speakers and focusing on the Teach-In being student-researched and student-led made the event radically populist.

The route we had decided to pursue meant that in addition to raising money to book a cool space (we chose to take over our university's chapel, a beautiful nineteenth century building on campus) and agitating for the event, we would also be spending a lot of time surveying and talking with students, compiling their responses, researching about the occupation, and synthesizing our findings into a flashy, gripping presentation, then practicing it and delivering it to our peers.

But all our hard work paid off. Over a 100 people attended the Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In. We succeeded in gaining significant media attention (campus, local, and regional), educating ourselves and empowering our fellow students. Half a dozen new organizers were recruited from the event, and soon got to work on the Anti-war Walkout as well as the many other campaigns we're running. Students were attracted to a message of mass empowerment through the practice of democracy, without relying on the use of outside authorities, which we hold to be the greatest lesson of the 2007 Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In.