Political Apathy at UConn: What makes students want to create change

What is the best motivator for people to take action? I believe there are two answers. In the short term, excitement. When people are inspired, when their hearts burn with the feeling that they can do something big, they are led to do something. In the long term though, the answer is interdependence. When we recognize ourselves as part of something, we are naturally led to want to do something about it. Last year, to end the first year of this column, I wrote an article focused primarily on this second point and about the factors that led to a distinct lack of it on UConn’s campus. This year, I want to focus on the former idea and what leads people to not be excited about social change on this campus.  

To talk about excitement and inspiration on this campus, it’s worth exploring the moments when people have felt it the most. There are three distinct examples from the past 6 years.  

First is the pro-Palestinian encampment which took place at Dove Tower last year in April. This action was the result of months of organizing and relationship building, culminating in a mobilization of around 300 people and a consistent presence on campus for almost an entire week. People were inspired by Columbia, Yale, Harvard and all other campuses with encampments. It gave the strategy of an encampment a certain weight by its association with these other movements, which pushed those here to take action as well. The collective weight of the “moment” felt across the country made people excited at the prospect of “winning,” so they moved out to make that happen.  

The second is the mobilization from 2022 against sexual violence on campus. In this case, the spark came from one student bravely speaking out about their sexual assault case being covered up by the university, resulting in multiple mass mobilizations of people that were felt across the university.  

Finally, there was the Fridays for Future movement, which took place in 2019 to demand international climate action. The local group at UConn was very well organized and they held one rally which attracted over 1000 students and conducted a long-term sit-in at Gulley Hall to protest for climate action. In this case, this action was part of an international movement of the same name, led by Greta Thunberg in Europe.  

These are the biggest and most impactful events in the recent history of UConn activism, and there are a few key themes to extract from them.  

In the cases of the encampment and the climate movement, they had an international basis. These movements dominated the media sphere and political discussion during their peaks. This created excitement since people were able to be part of something they saw working, or at least seemed like it was, elsewhere. The pressure from across the globe worked antagonistically against the target but also impressed upon people a hopefulness that they could make change.  

In the case of the sexual violence protests, this was not a result of an international movement, but rather an extremely salient, UConn-specific feeling. This is what made it just as effective, as the exigence for the mobilization was closer to home. As a result of that, and the fact that the actions had specific, local goals, people felt the same opportunity to make real change.  

Overall, the consistent factor in these three cases has been that people felt, relative to the size of the goals of a campaign, adequately motivated and optimistic about change resulting from their actions.  

So, if this has only been achieved three times in the past 6 years of history at UConn, how do we create the circumstances for it to happen more often? The answer lies in people understanding the place of the academy in creating broad social change. Often, there is a lack of understanding in how taking local action will relate to broad scale political change, but really the two are very connected at universities. These are places of extreme political weight and cultural power. 

In “protest schools” like Columbia, I believe they’ve attained this reputation because students there understand the connection between their actions, physical context and the weight on the broader American political sphere. The way to make UConn students excited about political change, reverse the apathetic culture and create a context where people are excited about making an impact on the world is to let students understand they already have more power to do that than they realize. When that connection is made and they know their power, they can begin to use it.