Andrew Golis

I honestly don’t know yet. As much as I didn’t want to write a post about what’s wrong with the iop without offering a productive alternative, some sort of plan to move forward, I’m going to anyway. Maybe you all can comment on whether or not you think my description of the problem is correct and that’ll lead to some good ideas…

The basic problem is this: rather than being a place for new political ideas, political empowerment and getting youth involved, the Institute of Politics tends to be a place for those who are already empowered to play internal political games and make good connections for the future of their political careers. The result is that those who are highly involved in the iop tend to be rich, white and mainstream.

To be clear, it’s not that there’s a problem with being rich, white and mainstream. In many ways, I’m pretty much all three of those things. Those who are those things shouldn’t apologize for it of feel guilty, it’s not they’re fault. However, if the IOP’s goal is to get MORE people involved, to empower young people, this is surely a problem.

The reason it’s a problem is that it represents everything that disempowers and makes people cynical about the political process. Those who are cynical, especially those who are educated and cynical, are reacting to a system that seems to be all about gamesmanship and connections, style over substance, self-important Senators who fly around in big jets. While I think that letting a problem demotivate you from activism is essentially political cowardice (no wonder the system is screwed up if all the good people are so disgusted that they don’t get involved), it’s hard not to admit that there’s a huge amount of truth in that perception.

Two good friends of mine are the new President and Vice President of the IOP. The VP is one of my blockmates. They’re both great people who have strong beliefs and good intentions. But, I know that they wouldn’t deny that the fact that, like me, they come from privileged white backgrounds and are good at networking and the side of politics that many find distasteful is a serious problem if their goal is to get those people involved. If the IOP truly wants to break the back of the American youth’s cynicism (as I’ve been told is a part of the goal), it needs to not appear to represent exactly what makes those youth cynical.

The problem, however, is two-sided. Like the UC and the Crimson and others of the big mainstream Harvard organizations, the IOP has a hard time getting people who aren’t “mainstream” or “status quo” for reasons beyond this. And, on this issue, the problem becomes much more complicated and points to a fundamental political question that I wouldn’t even know how to answer.

The most talented leaders of non-mainstream communities, whether the black community, gay community or radical community, often choose to lead those communities rather than being a part of organizations like the IOP. Quick logically, it seems, they prefer to fight for their own community by leading it instead of pushing to lead the whole campus through these other structures. I have no idea whether or not that choice is good or bad, it gets to a bigger political question over whether or not it’s better to fight from outside or within the system in question. But for organizations like the IOP or the UC, its a fundamental problem that makes outreach and changing their dynamics much harder to accomplish.

So, that was kind of a rambly entry, hopefully it makes some sense. Anyone have any thoughts on what to do? Anyone disagree with my perspective?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2005 at 12:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.