Over the last few weeks, a portion of the student body here has been upset about something. Not the kind of upset where they’re not being themselves for a while, and finally, a friend pulls them aside and says, “Hey, Chase, do you want to talk about anything? I’m here for you, man.” Rather, the kind of upset where every page of this publication is filled with columns expressing outrage, befuddlement, and threats of withheld donations that weren’t going to be made anyways.
Discontent regarding the issue in question has dominated campus (and Campus) discussion, and both the amount and vociferousness of opinions have been shocking. Alumni contacted administrative officials, panels were formed, and, again, columns were written. And the outcome of all that: Nothing! The policy is not changing in any way, and the people who formed the policy, chiefly an Athletic Director who was so unfamiliar to large portions of the student body that people were unclear as to whether the individual was male or female, essentially laughed off requests for greater transparency. At this point, people are so tired of the story that the new most popular opinion has become, enough of this, let’s go shotgun a beer.
Don’t worry, this is not a column about that policy. Feel free to shotgun regardless.
The question that occurred to me during all of this, especially as it became obvious that no changes would be made, was the following: if there were a policy implemented that actually mattered, one that was, say, intolerably discriminative in a way that this past one did not even approach, how could students force a change?
As the recent nouveau-activists will tell you, there are basically zero avenues to create change if the college really cares about the issue. That is because students have absolutely no leverage against the school. When the administration institutes a policy they know will be unpopular, they are banking, literally, on the reality that the only thing we can do to hurt them is transfer and take our business elsewhere. They realize that this would mean, for any individual student, a sizable time investment as well as leaving a familiar setting. And if you happened to see the acceptance rates this past year, you know that there is no end of checkbooks out there waiting to take our places. We are what is called, I believe, a captive market.
As a result, we are left with few options for student protest. Although mass gatherings can be symbolically powerful, the ceiling on their potential efficacy is pretty low when the protestors have no political voice. In this light, I would like to suggest to future outraged students a path that has not, to my knowledge, been explored here: a student employee strike.
The college employs 885 students, most of whom work between 10-20 hours a week. If we say the average is 12 hours a week, a campus wide strike by student workers would amount to a total of 3,450 lost hours of work over three days. How would the circulation desk, Midd Rides, Wilson Café, Admissions, or the CFA function without student employees? Who would grade all those Econ assignments?? When you consider all the jobs performed by students, it is clear that the college would seriously struggle to operate in the event of a strike.
There are flaws in this idea, the most obvious of which is the lost income it would mean for student workers. However, it is not implausible to think that other students could contribute to a compensatory fund of some kind as a means of distributing the burden. Another possible unwanted side effect would be the enormous demand placed on non-student college employees. They would certainly be called to make up for some of the lost labor, which would be pretty unfair. But the point of the strike would be to force the college into that kind of uncomfortable situation, and while any inconvenience to third parties would be regrettable, it would hopefully be minimal.
Again, this would have to be in response to a truly unacceptable administrative policy, the likes of which we haven’t recently seen. It would have to be to instigate the coordination and determination necessary to pull of a student employee strike. Ideally, a measure as drastic as this will never be necessary. In the meantime, it is useful, and perhaps empowering, to remember that we aren’t merely consumers of the product Middlebury offers: we are also vital elements of the machine that allows it to run.
Artwork by ZARAU ZARAGOZA
