Should scholars become activists?

Sweat racks my brow as I climb the final steps to the eighth floor of an apartment building on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. I take a minute to catch my breath, and use that time to find the name of the supporter. After buzzing once, the person opens the door and I repeat the words I’ve been saying all day: “Hey! My name’s Marley, I’m volunteering for the Ocasio-Cortez campaign. The election is today, have you voted for her?” The voter smiles, assures me that they have, and I thank them before moving on to the next supporter. It’s the evening of June 26th, and I keep to this rhythm of canvassing until ten minutes before the polls close at 9:00PM. I hand the turf back over to the field organizer for this region, and make my way to the train that takes me back to Manhattan. It’s traveling through east Harlem when the news finally breaks: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist longshot, triumphed over long established centrist Joe Crowley. The month of commuting two hours to knock on doors and phone-banking had paid off: New York’s 14th district was sending a socialist to Congress.

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign is now famous for demonstrating a proof of concept: the success of a campaign is only measured by the number of people willing to make it a reality. While three extremely mad academics fervently wasted a year writing fake papers for Jordan Peterson’s approval, Ocasio-Cortez convinced me and other graduate workers to knock on doors in the Bronx on the weekends and to run up and down numerous flights of stairs on election night by offering a plan for free, public higher education, the cancellation of federal loans issued to students for college, and a labor platform that would protect graduate workers and adjunct faculty across the country. These were solutions that began with the premise that higher education is a basic human right, and that our society ought to provide and support institutions that makes this basic human right accessible. Her success against impossible odds was based on a platform of similar demands, all of which resonate with voters across this country. And above all, her success depended on volunteers who recognized our political power lay predominantly in our ability to organize.

The victory of Ocasio-Cortez—and later in the summer, Julia Salazar—presented a model for Nathan Robinson’s lamentations as an academic during the 2016 election: “I regret that I didn’t do more for Sanders, and then that I didn’t do more for Clinton after Sanders lost. I should have been knocking doors. Instead I watched movies and wrote magazine articles and went to class. I wrote an academic article. An academic article! What on earth was I thinking?” Those of us who similarly watch sadly at the wholescale corporate transformation of higher education should be taking notes from this political lesson. What matters is not the time we demand our colleagues vote, or the phone calls we make to senators; Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court Justice, despite no one wanting him there. What matters is asking how our universities and the communities in which they reside could be made accountable to its members, and what you will do to make that happen. Even if a Left candidate is unavailable (although DSA’s endorsements for this cycle encompass 13 states), you certainly have a labor struggle on your campus, or a community suffering under the weight of your university that has put considerable time and effort into answering this question. ...