“I would feel like a horrible person if I saw that and turned my back and walked away,” White said.
Realizing that, as a consumer, she had the power to help shape the business practices of corporations, White embarked on a campaign to bring Fair Trade produce to Princeton, she said. Her first step was to submit a referendum for this past USG election recommending a campus-wide switch to Fair Trade bananas. Her referendum passed by a wide margin, and White said she is planning a more comprehensive survey of Fair Trade and the University community in January.
White chose not to take her campaign to the streets, instead launching a quieter campaign to initiate projects like the USG referendum. She, along with other civically engaged students interviewed for this article, described Princeton as a campus where students organize lecture series and film screenings rather than protests and rallies. Some, such as Anscombe Society member David Pederson ’12, described the campus culture as one of “apathy,” though Vice President for Campus Life Janet Dickerson said she sees Princeton students as “strategic and nuanced in their activism.”
Anne Twitty GS, the graduate chairwoman of Princeton Pro-Choice Vox, suggested that the campus community is politically passive.
“I think Princeton’s culture, which tends to emphasize gentility, also discourages students from actively engaging in politics, which seem to be tinged, in the popular mind, with a certain kind of unseemly self-aggrandizement,” Twitty said in an e-mail. “Princeton students are no doubt ambitious, but they’re committed to making their advancement appear effortless. Activism, especially grass-roots organizing and protesting, doesn’t provide that kind of cover.”
Several students involved in campus campaign groups described the student body as engaged in political events and causes, but unwilling to make a commitment to launching large-scale campaigns.
“You have to put a lot of time into events like this, and it’s a challenge, especially when it doesn’t directly affect you,” Raffi Grinberg ’12, vice president of Tigers for Israel, said in an interview.
When protests do take place on campus, they can inhibit constructive dialogue, Grinberg added. He pointed to a time last year when his organization arranged an event called “Palestinian Education Awareness” that was protested by Princeton Committee on Palestine. “It seemed like the pro-Israel kids and anti-Israel kids just arguing.”
There tends to be less animosity at Princeton between opposing groups than at peer institutions, Pederson said.
“I was just at Yale a couple months ago, talking to some members of similar organizations, and they face much greater hostility — posters ripped down the day after they put them up,” he said.
White echoed Pederson’s observation. “People like to feel like they have a really balanced perspective on the issues, and we pride ourselves for our rationality more so than [for] our emotions.”
As a result, White added, “the word activist can have such emotional connotations that it doesn’t always serve you to portray yourself that way.”
In fact, some students noted that groups at Princeton today might not even have an established framework for active campaigning. “Because activism is so uncommon on campus, there isn’t really a blueprint for how it’s supposed to be done,” White said. “People don’t always know how to respond.”
Laura Huchel ’10, a member of Princeton Animal Welfare Society (PAWS), Princeton Progressive Nation and College Democrats, noted that PAWS has held purposefully provocative demonstrations before, including one that involved students wearing bathing suits and fake blood while “packaged like meat.” The intent is not to horrify observers or guilt them into making changes, she explained.
“Sometimes without a few provocative events to attract the attention of the broader campus population, it seems like we’re just talking amongst ourselves — preaching to the choir of already active students, so to speak,” Huchel explained in an e-mail.
But a lack of protest culture doesn’t mean Princeton students are apathetic, several members of the campus community said.
“I think it is a mistake to measure social and political engagement exclusively by the number of protests and rallies,” politics professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell said in an e-mail, adding that Princeton students get involved in causes in “a number of different ways, making use of new media, academic settings and university resources to affect the social issues that matter to them.”
“Students in this generation may be more strategic and nuanced in their activism than in the past when campus protests and rallies were more prevalent,” Dickerson said in an e-mail, adding that she has seen “many students engage in media, internet or other technology-based campaigns.”
“Princeton students are very effective negotiators who bring their considerable skills as analysts and investigative researchers to the table when making arguments,” she added.
“Sometimes our strategies are just different,” Huchel explained, noting that groups will hold “talks and film screenings more often than protests and demonstrations. These strategies are usually less visible, but not necessarily less effective.”
“The measure of activism is not how you do it, but what you achieve,” University Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69 said in an e-mail.
“In my experience Princeton students are very effective in their community and global engagement,” he added. “This year we have 20 admitted students performing public service in four countries through the [bridge-year] program. I don’t know of any other university doing anything like this.”
While inflammatory protests may be less common at Princeton, students said they don’t think this makes their efforts less effective. Amnesty International, which has active chapters on many college campuses, relies almost exclusively on writing letters to government officials to assist political prisoners.
“It sounds rather ineffective but the practice of many people taking the time to handwrite letters to governments in order to shame them into releasing political prisoners or protecting them from torture is somehow very effective,” said Marian Messing ’11, president of Princeton’s Amnesty International chapter. “Amnesty International has succeeded in getting 44,000 people released from prison and protected from torture or death threats since 1961.”
Yale senior Stav Atir, one of the co-coordinators for Yale’s chapter of Amnesty International, said he believes there’s a “fair amount” of activism at Yale. “If you’re on campus and you’re looking for ways to get involved, you don’t have to look too hard,” he said in an e-mail.
Atir said that Yale’s chapter of Amnesty engages in not only letter writing but also in staging political events. “For example, when gay marriage was legalized in [Connecticut], we had a party themed ‘gay marriage killed the dinosaurs’ where we had people dress up as brides and grooms and get fake-married,” Atir explained. “And we had dinosaurs, of course.”
Though students may not hold frequent visible protests, members of the campus community said they think Princeton students continue to engage with important issues in different ways.
“I believe Princeton students fully embrace their call to be in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations,” Harris-Lacewell said.
Correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled the name of Marian Messing '11.
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