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Stanford has too many social-justice activists, says veteran social-justice activist

Remember the good ol’ days at Stanford University, when you could “count the major student groups and movements” on your hands?

Senior and Stanford Daily columnist Lily Zheng does, and she thinks they got more done than today’s hordes of “social justice” activists who are really just “reframing what they already do as activism.”

Zheng, who focuses on “consent culture, queer and trans identity, social justice and activism” in her column, wonders if there’s an “oversaturation” of activism on campus:

When activism was the sole purview of a dedicated core of activists (and I could count the major student groups and movements involved on my hands), a large focus was placed on mobilization, resource creation and campus-wide change. Burnout was common and intersectionality was rare, but communities were tight-knit and supportive.

The rapid creation of new student groups over the past few years has taken the core of activist mobilization, split it into a hundred pieces and scattered them across campus. Paradoxically, Stanford now has more events, more speakers, more projects and more interest around social justice and activism even as it has less collaboration, less coordination, less event attendance and less movement-building. Burnout is still common (though now it’s intersectional burnout), and our communities, organizing and work have become as scattered as our student groups.

The result is “well-intentioned activism that repeats the work (and mistakes) of the past without tangibly building on that work, all over campus with every topic imaginable,” Zheng writes.

Nobody has time to build coalitions or a “repository of knowledge” that sustains activism from one class to another, so perhaps Stanford students could be more effective with “fewer student groups, fewer events and more informal organizing”:

Rather than the fast-paced, chaotic environment we have today where activist events happen every hour, we could have fewer but longer events, with more continuity in terms of both content and attendance. We could make movements that create their own leadership pipelines, advocate for long-term institutional change over more than four years at a time and hold their own institutional memory.

Read the column.

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