Late Assignment (Leadership)

Ashley Ward and a friend resolved to bring “Occupy Wall Street” to college campuses. They printed fliers, set up a Web site and blasted out e-mails. They told as many people as they could about their action plan. Occupy protests rapidly sprouted at other campuses: hundreds nationwide currently have or had some sort of Occupy-related activity going on. At Yale, a traditional feeder school for investment banks and hedge funds, students noisily protested a Morgan Stanley information session in the fall. Recruiting visits to Harvard, Princeton and Cornell have been similarly disrupted. Many of today’s new graduates find themselves heavily indebted, and to the same institutions that received multibillion-dollar bailouts in the financial crash. Median income is stagnant. Their public universities are underfinanced, and class sizes growing. College activists have linked these issues to broad critiques of the financial-political complex. Acts of protest have occurred nationwide for example Seattle Central Community Colleges found itself hosting not just protesting students but also Occupy Seattle campers who had been rousted from a downtown park. The problems that had riddled urban encampments found their way to the college site. Garbage accumulated. For their part, faculty members have largely supported the movement, participating in teach-ins and staging walkouts. After campus police at the University of California, Davis, doused students at a sit-in with pepper spray, it was the faculty association that called on the chancellor to resign. As Ericka Hoffman, 26, a junior at California State University, Bakersfield, and one of the organizers of Occupy Colleges mentioned, occupy protests at colleges provided a giddying sense of possibility. But the hardest battle, she believes, will be getting the political and financial masters of the universe to listen. I believe this article inspires leadership initiative, as students we should be supporting movements like these. A college diploma nowadays has become an expensive achievement to obtain, we are socialized to go to college, acquire loans, and try to prosper in an inflated economy, while there is economic inequality in society. As I student in high school I took leadership in a similar manner. In one of my groups, our budget was heavily cut; the group was called midnight run which feeds homeless people in Manhattan. In the previous years the school district would provide cans and food to donate but that year the school budget was focused on our new stadium. The funds to obtain food for the homeless were severely cut and we were told to find other means to feed people. As protest some friends and I placed posters all over campus highlighting this injustice and wrote to our board of directors until they listen. Our schools newspaper even wrote an article on our protest showing how bias the budget was being spent. With no option left the school provided more money to our club and a sense of pride emerged from all of us who spoke out to these injustices. Sometimes it really does take a small group of individuals to change an institution.