The simple beauty of a good old fashioned student protest
Flipping through Tom Tomorrow's blog last night, I ran across an inside account, blogged live, of a moderately successful administration building takeover by University of Illinois students last week. For some time, students, faculty and community leaders have fought to have the "Chief" mascot removed from athletic events, and after the issue was removed from the Board of Trust agenda, students decided to take some action. From this page, you can follow the ">>" symbol to read the progression of posts throughout the protest.

The most interesting thing about this is that the protestor doing the blogging, who claims not to have organized or planned this exercise, clearly has some experience planning (at the very least) a takeover of this particular building. He teaches it as a part of his philosophy intro class (if you follow the link, make sure you scroll down to see the building diagrams).

"My lesson plan follows.

So you want to occupy Swanlund?
This is a practical lesson, so I'm not going to dwell on the justification of civil-disobedience. Suffice it to say that if you're going to break the law you'd better have a serious grievance and you'd better have sought redress within the law first.
[SNIP]
Some questions you have to answer before going in:
--Are your demands are both explicit and workable?
--How long are you willing to stay?
--Who is making the decisions?
--Who is talking to the police?
--Who is your lawyer/bail bondsman?
--What are you going to eat?
--Who is talking to the press?

The list goes on. Don't think that there's such a thing as an over-planned action.

One more disclaimer: I'll only be talking about what goes on inside, but a successful action requires a lot of outside support. You need people providing security, talking to the press, talking to the public, picketting, and supporting the folks inside. Ideally, every disobedient will have their own support worker ready to feed cats, water plants, pay bail, and document any abuse by authorities."

Without knowing how he presents it, I guess I shouldn't criticize, but I have some questions about how, exactly, he fits that lesson into the course. I can think of interesting ways to frame it, and I do like the idea in general of college students learning that sort of thing in a class, but his insulting premise that "...you ought to provide philosophy students with a little bit of practical education," as if there is something inherently impractical about Socrates and Aristotle, makes me skeptical of his approach.

Other than an occasional and highly unnoticed public complaint here and there, my college life was especially protest-free, sadly...unless you count the Dukakis signs on my dorm-room door. At Belmont, that was plenty radical.