The Canvass Model

In my own experience as a canvasser, I came away from the experience feeling that canvassing is latter-day door-to-door salesmanism. Instead of vacuums or luggage, you try and sell politics. You do this by explaining a political problem, why they person at the door should find the problem important, and then solicit a donations for a group that will - purportedly - solve it. In return for making a donation people often get something vaguely material; usually a membership sticker, card, sometimes a newsletter subscription. Most of the money collected by a canvasser is used to finance a staff of employees who specialize in the campaign work itself. These full time employees tend to be organizers, lawyers, issue researchers, even lobbyists themselves. The door-to-door canvassers themselves are effectively subtracted from the actual program work they solicit for.

In many ways, this is an excellent private citizen solution to common collective action problems; such as clean air and water advocacy, as well as other general environmental externalities. While people tend to have an expectation that the air they breath and the water they drink is clean, this preference is often so general that there is no specific advocate for the issues itself. Non-profits are designed to represent these kind of generalized preferences, and through the canvassing model they can literally give people an opportunity to express their preferences by donating. Canvassers are, in effect, asking people to 'purchase' whatever policy being advocated. This is important becasue, although technically separate organizations, MassPIRG share significant infrastructure and personnel with a group called The Fund for the Public Interest, or 'The Fund' for brevity. This organization describes itself as a creator of "public support needed to overcome powerful special interest opposition," by "train[ing] our staff to raise money, recruit members and do grassroots political work on behalf of more than 50 progressive organizations" (Fund, main page). As we will later see, much of MassPIRG's recruitment tactics, and model overall is reflected by The Fund itself.

The reason why canvass system is so influential on MassPIRG's recruitment tactics is because it is so effective. For non-profits that wish to run lobby-specific political campaigns, canvassing offers three distinct advantages. First, it maximizes donation revenue, it casts the widest possible next for organizational membership and has proven to be highly flexibility, both in terms of location and personnel.

The first reason why MassPIRG, and similar groups employ a canvass is financial. For any non-profit, securing both a steady and adequate stream of income is easily a top consideration. One of the realities of interest politics is that the most moneyed party often prevails. As these organizations attempt to influence state, federal, and even international policies, they are increasingly being met to bigger and better funded oppositions. “[Greenpeace's] challenge is how can we be as sophisticated globally as Ford Motor Company,” or “General Electric or Exxon Mobil,” ” explains a former director Joe Passacantodo, (Fisher 74). Often, victory or defeat on an issue will boil down to which group was able out spend the other. What results from this is a kind of political auction, where political spending is proportional to policy influence. In such a climate, there is enormous pressure on non-profit organizations like MassPIRG to raise as much money as possible. Canvassing allows them to do that, by casting the widest possible net by, literally, going to every door soliciting donations.

This brings us to the second advantage the canvass offers. It maximizes potential membership in the same way it maximizes donation revenue; canvassing casts the widest recruitment net possible by attempting to contact every single resident in a given area. This kind of meticulous self-promotion ensures a degree of name recognition and interest. By literally talking to everyone you can, everyone is informed and given a chance to join.

The final advantage non-profits enjoy with a canvass model is flexibility, both location and personnel. The basic format of the Canvass Model is an office run by two or three salaried full-time employees, who recruit, train and direct canvassers. The canvassers themselves are often walk-ins with little to no experience in politics or organizing. As Dana Fisher explains, canvassers are trained and sent to canvass the same day they are hired, as the training itself consists of simply memorizing a pre-written speech of 2 to 3 minutes, and a short tutorial on how to full out donation and tracking paperwork. Standard in the industry is a two or three day probationary period, where if the canvasser does not reach a day's quota, they are let go.


This template allows for a canvass office to be open virtually anywhere, anytime. In more rural regions, bike and camp-canvassing tactics have yielded results. Dense, urban areas use the street canvassing tactic, where canvassers simply stand in a spot and solicit pedestrians. This flexibility allows non-profit's to tap into multiple revenue streams, and allows it to broaden their membership base. For both the reasons of profitability and portability, the Canvass Model of organizing has become ubiquitous among high profile progressive political groups, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the Democratic National Committee.

However, despite these advantages, organizing a membership base through the canvass has failed to emerge as a panacea for these (and countless other) lobby-focused non-profits. Within the various critiques of the canvassing organizational model, two major claims emerge. First, the donation/membership method of organizing fails to create horizontal bonds between members, a necessary element of any social change movement. Second, the model creates a professionalization of activism that has numerous perverse if unintended consequences.

The first criticisms of the Canvass Model argues that the basic criterion for organization membership – making a donation – fails to generate a robust horizontal bond between the groups members. Meaningful campaigns for social change, critics insist, must be built on a foundation of strong interpersonal bonds between group members. The argument alleges that soliciting for donations with paid canvassers fails to build these kind of horizontal bonds between group members, since the act of donating to a stranger at your door, and occasionally reading a newsletter or e-mail about the groups activities, fail to strengthen, or even create, any kind of interpersonal bond. Without these connections, groups have now foundation to motivate it's membership into individual action. Author Dana Fisher describes the problem:

The People's Project[footnote 1] was using the canvass to accumulate political clout in the form of postcards to bolster its lobbying efforts on their clean water campaign. Instead of educating the public about ways to pressure their political representative personally, or actually cleaning up the polluted river - both of which are difficult, long-term projects - the organization identified how much money and how many names it needed to work the political system and then paid canvassers to achieve these instrumental goals” (34)

Instead of engaging their members with work, educating them on issues or organizing them for demonstrations, the paid Canvass Model allows donors to defers these physical acts of issue advocacy to paid professionals. Since the canvassing model simply soliciting people for donations, and then uses those donations to finance professional advocates, groups like Fisher's People's Project are minimizing the groups investments in its members, and in turn many of the People's Project's members maintain a low commitment to the organization. Running a canvass based campaign, thus enables those who donate to effectively outsource their political advocacy; as their donation pays for the professional advocate to argue on their behalf.

This, at face value, shouldn't strike the reader as such a lamentable state of affairs. Many, if not most people lack the time, expertise or opportunities to effectively lobby their representatives. Organizations like the People's Project give these people a chance to both express and assist the advocacy of their preferred policy goals. However, this has a damaging unintended consequence. “Paying canvassers to go door to door ensures that locals are contacted,” Fisher argues, “but it does not engage the local institutions of civil-society that have enduring roots in the communities” (96).

Since canvassed members are not mobilized, groups like the People's Project create no opportunities for their members to meet and make interpersonal ties. These observations on the lack interpersonal exchange, Fisher explains:

“...are consistent with the findings of scholars such as Robert Putnam, who concluded that the 'explosive growth in interest groups represented in Washington … is not really a counterexample to the supposed decline in social connectedness because they are not really associations in which members meet one another'” (71 emphasis mine)

This is known as weak-tie organizing; the process of constructing a large network of weakly bonded members. It is important to note that no one is arguing that creating a weak-tie network is, a priori, a flawed way to base an political organization's membership. In some ways, weakly-tied political networks offer an advantage. By appealing to a broader section of people, groups have access to a larger contributor base. The caveat with weak-tie organizing is that explains sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, is that while tenuous, associative ties can be “our greatest source of new ideas and information,” these “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism” (par 15). The reason for this, he explains, is that weak associational ties “doesn't require you to confront socially entrenched norms and practices.” (par 16). Making commitments, especially to abstract things like organizations and political ideas, is a two-way street. Asking less of those who join, those who join expect less from the campaign.

The second major critique of the canvass-based organizational model shifts the focus, by criticizing effect canvassing has on the canvassers and directors themselves. Critics allege that the proliferation of the professional and regimented canvassing model has serious negative consequence that offset whatever fund raising advantage the template might provide. [Professionalized] organizations accomplish quite a bit and have been very effective at reaching some of their goals,” admits activist Cynthia Kaufman, but “rarely to those those hired canvassers become deeply committed to a lifelong involvement in social transformation. For a movement to grow, people's commitment's to it have to grow” (270). The problem, Dana Fisher diagnoses, is that the “top-down directives,” endemic to the canvass-model, “are a central components of the scripted and institutionalized setting of the canvass office (29).

This kind of centralized, bureaucratized model of social activism is completely repudiated by the New Left and their values of prefigurative politics and participatory democracy. Our next model, the Relational template, is much more compatible with these values.

Organizing: Overview

Models for Lobby-specific Non-Profits

Successful political organizing requires a lot of things different pieces to work, all at the same time. Things like effective communication, influential tactics, recruiting a committed membership base and a securing source of fund raising all paly into the odds of a campaign's success. Probably the the more difficult question facing an organizer, whether an executive director or a simple campus organizer, is how best to maximize these basic pieces; while also weighting factors such as political context and organizational capacity.

Different groups, clearly, will organize a campaign differently based on certain judgements. Groups like MassPIRG - the subject of this paper - have a specific focus on public policy lobbying. What that means is that MassPIRG, along with other public interest lobbies like USPIRG, Sierra Club and Greenpeace have adopted a strategy of influencing the legislative process by show of popular support and pressure tactics targeted at elected officials. These types of non-profits rely on large memberships and traditional voting constituencies, and thereby tend to use organizing methods that emphasizes large turnout and high visibility. To maximize these organizing goals, there are two basic organizing models: the Canvass and the Relational Model. This paper is now going to examine these two methods of organizing, since MassPIRG uses both methods.

Since MassPIRG, as a statewide organization, has two separate units. First, there is the Student PIRGs, which are made up of the university chapters, which UMass-Amherst is a part of, and represent student political goals. This arm of MassPIRG is primarily funded through the aforementioned student fee, and is the primary focus of this paper. The other is the Citizen PIRG; which is oriented more toward issues faced by the general public, such as water quality and consumer protection. This part of MassPIRG is primarily funded through a summer canvass. The reason why I make these organizational distinctions is because they illustrate a clear contrast in organizing models. More specifically, understanding the basic components of these two models is essential to understanding MassPIRG's recruitment model.

The following section will detail the Canvass and Relational models of organizing in a somewhat dichotomous fashion. The first possible method of high turnout and high visibility organizing is the Canvass Model. Relatively new in the scope of political organizing, canvassing offices are staffed with full-time directors, who hire and direct canvassers to solicit regular donations from the general population. As noted above, the Citizen arm of MassPIRG relies on a statewide summer canvass for funding, and focuses more on general public interest initiatives that enjoy popular support; examples include food safety and clean water campaigns.

In contrast is the second branch is the Student PIRGs, which utilizes a more relational method of organizing. Relational organizing models rely less on an organized, heiarical staff and more on horizontally-cutting, interpersonal bonds between members as the foundation for its coordination and action. The Student section of MassPIRG takes after this template. This is possible in part because this division of MassPIRG is funded through the student fee. This allows both more time and energy to be devoted to program work rather than fund raising, and partially insulates the groups from political winds, allowing students to take on more controversial or politicized issues. Examples of this include the Student PIRG's Global Warming Solutions and Save Dafur campaigns. Both the canvass and the relational methods come with their advantages and disadvantages.

Since MassPIRG utilizes both types of organizing, and they often have points of intersection, it is necessary to examine the relative merits of both templates. First, we will examine how lobby-specific non-profit's utilize canvassers, and the effects the format can have. Next, we will explore the relational organizing model, and pursue a similar analysis.

MassPIRG's Histroy

Ralph Nader is in many ways singularly responsible for the create of the Student Public Interest Research Groups. As chronicled in the Proposal to establish the Western Mass Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst1, Nader held a series of lectures around the Oregon colleges in 1971. In these speeches, Nader argued for the creation of a “a student-financed, student-controlled staff of full-time professionals which would work to solve the problems existing in society today” (par 1).

A few months after Nader's speaking tour, Oregon adopted the first PRIG when seven of Oregon State's campuses held votes to petition the Oregon State Board of Higher Education to establish a waivable fee funding system. Minnesota's seventeen campus followed in suit with similar votes, then Vermont. Despite Mr. Nader's clear influence, there is a clear priority in ensuring that there is no confusion between his inspiration and the actual governance of the PIRGs. “Mr. Nader has exercised no control over the development of any PIRG,” the WMPIRG founder's write, “and will exercise no control in the future” (par 4). The creation of WMPIRG, which would eventually become known as MassPIRG, was similar. From the founding charter:

“In early October [of 1971] with the encouragement of Mr. Donald Ross, a lawyer form Nader's Washington office, and the support of the Connecticut Valley Committee, a five-college are[a] recipient of a Rockefeller foundation grant, students from twenty colleges in Western Massachusetts met to begin organizational work for the establishment of a Western Massachusetts Public Interest Group (WMPIRG). This group of students decided to conduct a petition referendum to demonstrate student support for WMPIRG” (par 5)

By March of 1972, a “majority of students of the University of Massachusetts (54%) had signed the WMPIRG petition. Several faculty members as well as Chancellor Bromery have voiced their approval and support of the WMPIRG concept and funding procedure” (par 10). WMPIRG's status then became official on May 26th, 1972 when the Board of Trustees voted to approve both the organization and it's funding mechanism, a $2 waivable fee.

Now that we have a better grasp of the historical factors that created MassPIRG, as well as the intellectual heritage that underlies it, we can now turn to the the technical aspects of organizing of how they play into the organization's recruitment model.

The New Left

If forced to date the inception of the “New Left”; the anti-war/student-power/counterculture wave of the 1960s and 70s, historians tend to point to June 15th, 1962 and the Port Huron Statement. Drafted largely by Tom Hayden, the statement was ratified by about sixty students meeting in Port Huron, Michigan. “Filtered through the experience of the civil rights movement and reborn as a critique of a militarized, bureaucratic society and the organized man,” about sixty students, many attending the University of Michigan, met with the intention of chartering an offshoot of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, another left-wing activist group whose origins dated back to the turn of the century (Foner 289).

Hayden's statement consecrated the Students for Democratic Society, and more generally “captured the mood and summarized the beliefs of this generation of student protesters” (ibid). In it, Hayden wrote about seeking “the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims – that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men that provides the media for their common participation” (quoted in Foner 289) To achieve this, Foner continues, “the document called for the creation of a new left,” – 'a left with real intellectual skills,' in Hayden's words, made of “younger people who had come of age in the post war mold” (ibid).

Part of the reason why Hayden and those like him saw students as the saviors of America's left was in part because the traditional pillars of the left's constituency – the urban, industrial proletariat – was no longer viewed as sufficiently radical. This notion of authenticity is recurrent in liberal revolutionary political thought.

For example, because of the labor movement's success, such as mandatory work week lengths, basic safety requirements and other amenities we now take for granted, now made white workers as port of 'the system. As a result, only “the outcasts and outsiders,” the populations of unemployed, minorities and the young possessed the true revolutionary bonafides necessary for social change.

Yet a simultaneously theoretical yet deeply practical question posed on the New Left movement was; how are college students, easily more comfortable and privileged than most Americans, supposed to spearhead a subversive revolution? How, or why, would those most benefiting from the status quo then seek to abolish it? This incongruity was no lost on many new activists:

“Students are being oppressed? Bullshit,” wryly comments SDS member Carl Davidson, “We are being trained to be oppressors and the underlings of oppressors. Only the moral among us are being hurt. Even then, the damage is only done to our sensitivities. Most of us don't know the meaning of a hard day's work” (quoted in Schwartz 7, emphasis mine)

Against this relative comfort of the university life, the SDS organizers created a shift in revolutionary focus. “Instead of material deprivation, class conflict, and social citizenship, students spoke of loneliness, isolate and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions, of a hunger for authenticity that affluence could not sate” (Foner 287-288). Hayden and others carrying the 'New Left' banner hoped to realize the revolutionary rhetoric they espoused by arguing that the student-power movement should not be concerned with simple goal or the procurement of material benefits; examples of such practical demands include better student-to-teacher ratios, higher levels of tuition aid or more representation on university boards.

Hayden and his cohorts were aiming to attack the deeper structures of American's educational system itself. This attack was in many ways focused on changing the way politics was thought about and experienced, through the process of 'prefigurative politics' and 'participatory democracy.' These two themes are essential for an analysis of MassPIRG, it's recruitment model, and the student experience. The New Left's student activists accused mainstream American politics as being fundamentally undemocratic, arguing that their new form of political experience was the only alleviation: prefigurative politics and participatory democracy. Both of these ideas, while never authoritatively defined, ultimately were attempts to articulate the idea of individual power to participate in the decision that shaped ones life.

Prefigurative Politics

The practice of prefigurative politics meant to be “deeply connected with ends,” explains activists Cynthia Kaufman. “It is crucial for people in a social justice movement to treat one another with respect and care. In prefigurative movements, we are reweaving the social fabric,” (278). By exemplifying political ideals through personal action, the practice of prefigurative politics, activists hoped to “act right now as if we were living in the better world we are fighting for” (ibid). From the perspective of a social change activists, this is an intuitive idea. Lobbing criticisms of the status quo can only take a movement so far; comporting yourself to the idea you espouse can in many ways be a form of argument, using your own self as an example to illustrate a political ideal.

The basis of prefigurative politics created an emphasis on authenticity which was integral to the vocabulary of the New Left's activism, and carries to this day in student activist groups such as MassPIRG. For many students, this is a refreshing contrast to the general competitiveness of academic life. For example, one student leader in the UMass-Amherst chapter explained to me she joined, and enjoyed the recruitment process because "If you wanted an internship, you could have one. If you wanted to be a part if this you could do it. There was no competition for anything. Everyone was accepted, which was nice” (Alexa, 3:25-3:45). By accepting all willing applicants, MassPIRG helps demonstrative the social justice politics it advocates.

Participatory Democracy
The second important theme of the first-wave student-activism movement was notion of legitimacy through the full participation of citizens in a democratic process, termed 'participatory democracy'. The ideal of participatory democracy was (again) best articulated by Tom Hayden in his remarks at Port Huron before the statement's adoption. Freedom,” Hayden said, “is more than the absence of arbitrary restrictions on personal development.” Rather, it implied an individual ability to determine the factors that shaped their life (quoted Foner 289-90). However, in contrast with the ideals of prefigurative politics, participatory democracy was “never defined with any precision," and in many ways the ideal of participatory democracy was often used in the context of expressing the prefigurative political ideal on an institutional scale (Foner 271). What is meant by this, is that the decision making process of whole institutions (such as universities), should seek the participation of all pertinent members.

Yet how institution's could craft such a structure of decision making, outside of pure peblicites, was “never defined with any precision" (271). As such, the term was mostly “a critique of the undemocratic features of American Life," while participatory democracy "served as a blueprint" (ibid). The phrase “soon became a standard but which existing social arrangements – workplaces, schools, government, political parties and organizations of the Old Left – were judged and founding wanting” (289). In contrast, the new structures and institutions built in the New Left's participatory ideal, would imply organizations that better channeled the participation if its members; or, in the words of Kaufman, act as “vehicles for the expression of the people involved” (271).

It is hard to overstate how important this notion of participation and legitimacy has on current student power groups. For example, MassPIRG itself internalized this ideal, writing in their Board of Directors Manual:

Rarely will the Board move forward on an idea if it doesn't already have
organizational consensus. When a decision needs to be made by the Board, the Board
generally asks the chapters to discuss the issue in advance. Ideally, chapters are able to reach consensus on a decision in advance, so that the Board’s decision feels more like a “rubber stamp" (3, emphasis mine)

More importantly, students interviewed often expressed their ideal student organization similar participatory terms. One former campaign coordinator felt that "students [should be allowed] to come up with things on their own, completely from scratch," and that "people would have more power if they were able to figure things out on their own" (Nicole, 18:35-20:00). Similarly, a former intern expressed satisfaction with her work in a student run business because of how participatory it was; stating that:

[Working in a student run business was] interesting, especially because you also have to work with other students who are also on the same level, and when you communicate and figure out how to run the businesses, you're looking at other people to help you out...[it] was a communal feel of individual people taking on equal responsibility (Katherine, 16:45-18:08)

Vietnam
Earlier in this paper, the date of June 15th, 1962 was pointed to as the origins of the New Left , and more broadly the student power movement. This was not meant to mislead the reader with an impression that the origins of 1960s and 70s tumult, in all of its amorphous and eclectic facets, could be pin pointed on one date. The deeper fault lines that defined the contours of the New/Old Left split presaged Tom Hayden's activist manifesto, namely: the Cold War and Vietnam.

Hayden's ideal of a mass, student-led movement that not only instigated subversive action, but redefined how activists perceived their organization, would not have caught on the way it did by itself. As with any campaign or movement, there needs to be a organizing point, a fundamental issues that facilitates cross-cutting associations. For students in the 1960s and 70s, that issues was Vietnam.

This is important because both Vietnam specifically and the Cold War in general served as the as a “perfect antithesis to participatory democracy,” explains Eric Foner, “since American involvement had come through stealth, lives and elite decision – making with no semblance of public discourse (292). More to the point, these two events are what provided students the central rallying point, for a mass-movement, and the the underlying organizing principle in which “doubts, disillusionments, and hidden discontents now coalesced,” writes Eric Foner, who continues. “More than any other issue … what transformed student protest into a full-fledged generational rebellion was the war in Vietnam” (290 emphasis mine).

The themes of prefigurative politics, participatory democracy and the organizing principles of the Cold War all have direct effects on how MassPIRG is organized, the language its staff uses, and the experience students have when they are recruited. Armed with this understanding, we can no turn to the history of MassPIRG itself.

The Template: Black Power Movement

Without the Black Power movement, there would most likely would not have been a student power movement. One former activist, Henry Mayer writes:

The demand for “student power” was first raised during Berkeley’s second student strike in 1966 as conscious imitation of the cry for “black power.” I make such a precise historical assertion, not only because I participated in that strike and remember the spirit of novelty, passion and the self-conscious belligerence with which we took up this variation of the black power slogan (then it it's first months of notoriety), but because its emotional roots in the civil rights struggle provide some helpful perspectives in understanding what 'student power' means” (in Schwartz 26, emphasis mine)

The most iconic images of the black power movement, of course, conjure giants like Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X. But white, high school and college age young adults made numerous contributions to the movement in the 'trenches' of organizing. For example, in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, the “Student nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters and raises civil-rights awareness in the Deep South” (Gladwell par 10).

By working for black power organizations like the NAACP and the SNCC, white students where not only able to channel their professed disaffection with mainstream culture, but also learned important organizing skills. For example, the same Freedom Summer that relied on white students was “crucially,” in Gladwell's words, “strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures” (par 19).

Just as the Black Power Movement created a vocabulary, it also set up a structural model of how to fight and subvert a social establishment. Now we can see how the context of the 1960s and 70s gave students both the intellectual grounding, though the vast expansions in enrollment, and organizational tools required to begin a mass movement, with student's participation in the Black Power campaigns. We will now look at the movements resulted from this context; specifically, the New Left and the anti-war movement.

Student Power: First Wave

In contemporary America, the immediate transition from high school to college is becoming more and more common. According the the NCES, this trend really began in about 1980, when overall enrollment rates rose from their stable trend of 50%. This trend reached it's peak at 67% in 1997. And while "declined through 2001 to 62 percent before increasing to 69% in 2008" SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. (2010). The Condition of Education 2010 (NCES 2010-028), Indicator 21.

This proliferation of the bachelor degree has kind of pro-cyclical effect, where attaining a B.A. becomes more and more necessary to gain a minimum income that pays enough to ensure the middle-class lifestyle, such as giving once's one's children a college education.

The roots of this trend are traced to “the mid-1950s,” writes historian Eric Foner, “there were 2.7 million college students. By 1968, thanks to the coming of age of the baby boom generation and the explosion of institutions of higher learning that accompanied it, the number had risen to over 7 million” (288). Slowly, as a demand for higher education grew so did the supply of institutions. This trend allowed for better self-selection and choice for students; and, as this dynamic has persisted, the relationship between students and the education institutions that attend has become less paternalistic and more attuned to student's demands as consumers. As a result, students now enjoy much more choice, autonomy and empowerment at their universities.

But in the 1960s and 70s, this was not the case. The increasing number of students enrolling into colleges and universities grew at an astounding rate, much faster than new current institutions could manage. For context, by 19xx, university students outpaced farmers, miners and steelworkers in their proportion to America's overall demographics (Foner 288). Clearly, institutions of higher learning could not adapt to the influx right away.

This is important because this directly contributes to what would become the student power movment. The epicenter of the this new wave of activist students was, in the words of historian Eric Foner, the “quintessential Cold War 'megaversity,' Berkeley, which was an immense, impersonal institutions where enrollments in many classes approached one thousand students (290).

Understandably, many students reacted negatively to, in the words of activist Joel R. Kramer "the typical university is only slightly more democratic than the Army, if less unpleasant" (13). Both at Berkeley and other large state universities, “students spoke of loneliness, isolation and alienation, of powerlessness in the face of bureaucratic institutions, of a hunger or authenticity that affluence could not state” (Foner 288-89). But, the anger and anguish among this especially among young and relatively carefree set of individuals was unfocused and not entirely new.
Pockets of student radicalism have emerged in numerous times of crises. For example, in the Thirties, “there was intense student protests related to the deepening political-economic crises in Europe and the United States,” explains political scientist James Woods (xv). What set the student power movement of the 60s and 70s apart, and what makes this history so important for our understanding of MassPIRG today, is not just the student disaffection itself; but how the political context of the time channeled these feelings into serious action. As Walter Laqueur explains, "Youth movements have come and gone, but never before has one been taken so seriously" (19).

What made the student power movement so regarded not only in the context of the ear, but also today, requires some unpacking. The demographics factors described above were a direct cause for the motivations of the student-power movements, but it was the Black Power Movement that paved the way, giving student power activists both the vocabulary and a template for the eventual movement.

History: Introduction

To understand structure of MassPIRGs models, we have to have a grasp of what ideas and events shaped it.

Starting a discussion on MassPIRG's recruitment model, and the student experience with it, begins with the history of student activism. This is for three primary reasons. The first relates to how the record of student activism is portrayed by MassPIRG staff, especially for the purposes of recruitment and motivation. The second, more pertinent reason relates to how the historical context of student power plays directly into how recruited and non-recruited students perceive MassPIRG during the recruitment process. Lastly, the history of student activism still very much defines the contours of how the politicized students I interviews orient their relationship with the institution itself.

The history of student activism is immediately important because of MassPIRG's own aggressive promotion of it, particularly by making positive linkages between their current program work that they ask volunteers carry out, with victories scored in prior waves of student movements. Examples of this can be seen clearly the rhetoric of organizers, as well as campaign literature. The reasons for these linkages were clearly motivational in design to attract interested students. When asked why she decided to join MassPIRG over other Human Rights groups, one Save Dafur volunteer explained: "They make it seem like they have this pre-packaged, amazing [campaign] that MassPIRG knows exactly how to get this done. You just have to do it, it's not that difficult" (Jessie 5:00-5:20). But more than just projecting competence, MassPIRG is able to inspire students to make deeper commitments with the organization by aligning their current program work with the earlier student activists movements. This makes an abundance of sense, as many students join MassPIRG with the ideal of contributing to these very goals. By making linkages with past successes in social change to the current program work, students become more motivated by perceiving themselves as links in a chain of forward-thinking pioneers and public interest advocates.

However, the history of student activism itself complicated, and it's legacy is still quite contentious. The reason why this contention is important, is because individual students often draw their perceptions of MassPIRG, and more broadly student activism and social change movements, from their own opinions of the 1960s. For example, Paul Loeb writes in his book Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus, he explains how students often

"

[feel] unequivocally hostile to attempts at social change. When I [Loeb] suggested Vietnam-era efforts had made a difference, they called them self-indulgent, misguided and ineffective. The protesting, they said, made the war longer and spat on innocent soldiers caught in the middle" (14)

Similarly, students at UMass-Amherst have expressed negative views about the organization and to this author during his work as a MassPIRG volunteer. For example, in my field notes from my Spring 2010 recruitment drive, one student wrote "Die Hippie die," under his name on a recruitment card. As such, working on a MassPIRG recruitment drive, and being recruited yourself, requires a level of reconciliation with the history of student-activism with your personal political orientation. In someways, it is used as a cudgel by student's peers to take ownership for the worst of the excesses of 1960s and 1970s radicals. Conversely, it can be the foundation for the willpower students need to persist in their subversion of an inequitable status quo.

Clearly, the history of student activism is a double edged sword. But how does this relate to the underlying question of the recruitment model, and the student experience? This third, and final way history is pertinent to our investigation of MassPIRG's recruitment model is that it defines the student/institution relationship. As we'll see further in our explanation of the history itself, much of the methods, tactics and very vocabulary of MassPIRG itself is modeled by historical factors. In short, to understand structure of MassPIRG's recruitment model, we have to have a grasp of what ideas and events shaped that it.