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
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[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.
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