From marching into the Capitol Building in Lansing last month, Thursday, March 24, to the march across campus this past Thursday, April 14, it is clear that the students of Western have gotten the hang of Thursdays.
Last month, the Western Student Association, under the direction of then-President Aaron Booth and then-Political Affairs Chair Lauren Hearit, boarded nearly fifty students onto two buses and set their sights on the Capitol Building, where they stormed the rotunda as part of the annual Lansing Blitz, an event developed in partnership between all public universities in Michigan.
The area was familiar turf for WMU students Max Koopsen and Skylar Makowski, who had a week prior been in the same rotunda, being arrested as part of the infamous Lansing Thirteen protest of Governor Snyder’s “Emergency Manager” policy. Koopsen and Makowski lead delegations from all fifteen universities in rousing chants.
And these chants found their way to Western this past week, again under the direction of Koopsen and Makowski, among others. At their Flagpoles rally prior to marching to the Bernhard Center, to the Waldo Library, to Sprau Tower and beyond, Koopsen took the microphone and put the local student protests into a larger context.
“People around the world are realizing that they have the power to change the system,” Koopsen cited not just Wisconsin’s similar air of protest, but the torrent of grassroots revolution sweeping northern Africa and the Middle East. Koopsen made it clear that though students are protesting cuts to education, the real movement is larger, its goals are fundamental change in the world, and its reach is global.
Koopsen added in a post-march discussion, “In twenty years, our country will look a lot different than it does today.” Some might say that with pessimism, but Koopsen was hopeful. After the march it was mentioned that college students and unions had a long and historic alliance, and this group of protesters was sensitive to that as well. The rhetoric was for higher education, but the goals spread far wider than just that.
Though the march this past Thursday was, in many ways, fueled by the Lansing Blitz of last month, the Western Student Association pulled its support the day before the rally. President Erin Kaplan of the Association remarked that the withdrawal of support was due to ineffective communication between the past and current administration on the subject of the march.
Despite this withholding of support, members of the WSA turned out, like Trever Walters, a second-year voice in the Association, who banged enthusiastically on a bucket repurposed as a drum, and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship’s senator Erin Gignac, who went around gathering signed letters to mail to elected officials in opposition to education funding cuts. Even without the support of WMU’s student government, the student organizers of Thursday’s march are unfazed, planning continued events of demonstration against policies of Governor Snyder over the summer, particularly policies targeting the middle class, elderly, unions, college students, and K-12 education.
“We know things are tough,” Walters said, that month ago before the Lansing Blitz. So he, Koopsen, and only a half-dozen others sat down and came up with other ideas, other places to get the money the State needs to operate. From a ten-cent deposit on plastic water bottles to endingthe property tax exemption for natural resource manufacturers, the group was able to, in three hours, come up with more than enough funding offsets to cover the costs of education.
“We’re not sayingit all will work,” explained Max Glick, a WMU student who interns for Representative Sean McCann, “but a half-dozen of us in three hours came up with all these ideas.”
From one march to another, with rallies and meetings and Facebook postings galore between, not to mention the arrangement of the Lansing Thirteen, it’s clear that the students of Western are growing restless. From the eleventh-hour save of New Sangren to a Historic Moment to keep the medical school off our tuition, the University is doing what it can, but students facing rising costs across the board are still taking to the streets, and with reason.
Anthropology student Molly Metheny remarked: Every time something like this happens, and tuition soars, it means more people like me will have to drop out, because we just can’t afford it anymore.” Metheny works overnights full-time at Meijer to make rent and tuition, and had to turn down a rare study opportunity in her field available to her over the summer do to prohibitively high cost.
The ‘Molly Metheny story’ is a common one at Western, and across all of Michigan. We make due, we tell ourselves that this is just how it has to be. But the marchers remind us that that isn’t so. Costs have soared, our professors were educated through Doctorates cheaper than our BA’s will cost. This harsh truth is met with the fact that Michigan is exporting college students at an alarming rate, and laws targeting the middle class and unions will only make that situation direr.
Benjamin Franklin said “We must hang together, or we will surely hang separately,” and it is in that mindset that the organizers of Thursday’s march are working to support everyone that’s hurting right now; teachers, students, middle-class workers, state employees, unions, the elderly, and anyone who voted in local elections whose government might be replaced by emergency managers.
The organizers encourage students going home over the summer to carry that spirit of protest with them, and speak out for their beliefs. Personally, I transferred from St. Clair County Community College, the home of the Port Huron statement and the start of the fight against President Richard Nixon among college students. Maybe Kalamazoo is ready to be the next clarion call to the youth of America.