Op-ed: Put political science before protests

Here is an op-ed that ran in the AJC today (and in The Dartmouth yesterday).

Misguided protests worse than inaction
The Atlanta Journal Constitution
April 24, 2007

It happens every year, on every college campus: Students gather to protest some worldly injustice or call on some faceless organization (usually the U.S. government) to right some unspeakable wrong. Dartmouth is no exception: Last year, the Darfur Action Group gathered to sell T-shirts, put on concerts and hand out ribbons. They sought to put an end to the genocide of Africans in Darfur by forcing the College to divest from companies that do business with Sudan.

They won that battle, but lost the war. Dartmouth divested — along with Harvard, Yale and Stanford — yet the Sudanese kept (and keep) on dying. Content with their small victory, the Darfur Action Group disbanded.

Any hot-button issue can rouse the collegiate rabble from their homework and toward the megaphones. Although the Darfur genocide has receded to the background of our political lives, the Iraq war persists to fuel our anger. And so, on campuses across the nation, we forego class to call on President Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq. We protest despite the fact that withdrawal now would further destabilize the region. We protest despite the fact that if we exit, we will leave a Shiite-dominated Iraq — and play into Iran’s hands. We don’t understand politics. We understand injustice. And we protest against the current injustice, despite whatever greater injustice our proposed action might bring.

Political science, if we listened to it, would teach us that when people gather to pursue a collective purpose, the collective often subsumes the original purpose, and the people lose their true calling in the drunken excitement of the crowd.

We seem to protest for the sake of protest itself. A college protest is the act of “hanging out” politicized. For the proponents of “hanging out,” a protest is simply a change of venue. Yesterday, they rocked the stage in a fraternity basement. Today, they rock the stage for world peace. Perhaps we do this to spite our parents. Perhaps we do this because it just goes well with beer. Perhaps we sometimes stumble onto a valid argument, a true cause. On the off chance of that, please listen; but for the most part, don’t take us seriously.

I remember walking past an ad by a Georgia State University student group when I was home last summer. The ad invited all Georgians to “Save Palestine & Lebanon” by boarding the buses to Washington, D.C., and protesting in front of the Israeli embassy (a 10-hour ride). GSU students — whose college does not list any classes on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the course catalogue — discovered “injustice,” formed an opinion and began to rally the people.

You don’t need a Ph.D. in political science to understand cause and effect. Take the famous film director Steven Spielberg, who understands the political lesson his avid followers have yet to learn — find something your audience values, then leverage it to achieve your goal. Without incentive, protests will fail. The film director, now directing the artistic aspect of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, wrote a letter last week to Chinese President Hu Jintao, asking him “to bring an end to the human suffering” in Darfur. China cares about the Beijing Olympics, so when Spielberg wrote, Hu acted. He flew to Sudan and urged the government to accept U.N. peace workers. Last Monday, Khartoum agreed to let a 3,000-strong U.N.-African Union force into Darfur.

At the end of that same week, Amnesty International held a rally at the Chinese mission to the United Nations in New York. It sought to gather “more than 1,000 Amnesty International activists, primarily students” to “protest human rights abuses in Sudan.” They wanted Beijing to stop selling Khartoum weapons and to stop blocking sanctions on Sudan in the U.N. Security Council. Their call came too late; Spielberg beat them to it. Of the promised 1,000, only about 30 people came. I think the rest did their homework.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is scheduled to speak about the Darfur genocide in Filene Auditorium tomorrow. The injustices he will describe will make your blood boil. The first genocide of the 21st century is all the more reprehensible because so little has been done. Hearing that, you will want to act. But please, before you act, think — do your homework.