Conclusions About Tent State University

My previous post about Tent State opened up some conversations that clarified my feelings about the event. First of all, I no longer suspect that what we did can be considered as "wrong." Doing anything on campus to get students thinking is extremely important because it is necessary to disrupt students' complacency and make them question. We were very effective in doing this. Secondly, it is important to note that the strongest reactions were from the people who were already political and who were perhaps dogmatic about their beliefs. This is a very small population of the actual students, and therefore we should not worry about them or waste our time arguing with them. If some of them want to have a civil conversation, that is fine; but overall they are a distraction from the real audience. The regular students did not strongly reject what Tent State was presenting, and many were curious and open to conversation.

Moving forward, I hope that SDS can find a way to address both international struggles and issues that students can relate to, while making the connection between the two. My previous experience with SDS can confirm the necessity for working for both audiences to appeal to a wide variety of students. For example, at the prolonged times where SDS was engaged in student issues, many people who were more interested in international issues stopped being involved; now that our focus has shifted to international issues the opposite has occurred. One practical way we can do overcome this obstacle is by having two campaigns.

Regardless of the direction SDS takes, I hope the leadership avoids becoming distracted by the critical minority of students. Many students seem to think it is adequate to criticize those who take action, while abstaining from actually doing anything on campus. A more productive response from those who are critical would be to design their own actions and campaigns--then we will be more successful in achieving our goal for a more active campus.