September-October 2005

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Faculty Activism: Utopian Universities And International Activism

On campus and off campus, faculty members can make a difference. Two scholar-activists reflect on political work, both local and global.

By Patrick Brantlinger

Since September 11, 2001, it has become standard punditry to claim that we’ve entered the Age of Terror. But for those who refuse to be terrified, our era may have a very different feel—that of an Age of Hope. That is certainly the emotion evoked by the motto of the World Social Forum (WSF): “Another world is possible.” Hope characterized the thousands of activists—many of them students—who came from around the world to the fifth WSF, held in January 2005 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to exchange ideas about peace, human rights, fair trade, environmental sustainability, and other worthy goals. Founded in 2001, the WSF meets annually for this purpose. For North American scholars and activists like me, the WSF offers an amazing education about struggles for global justice, full of hope, that are taking place all over the world.

I attended the WSF as a member of both the human rights organization Global Exchange and the Progressive Faculty Coalition, established at my university after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Activities of the coalition have included weekly discussions, open to the public, on issues ranging from the war in Iraq to the pros and cons of the No Child Left Behind legislation. With others, I have developed presentations on transnational corporate capitalism and “alternative globalizations”—social movements that work against the negative consequences of global trade agreements for the poor, the environment, and peace—through which I first learned about the WSF.

For the 2005 WSF, one of my colleagues, Mike Gasser, a professor of linguistics and computer science at Indiana University and one of the leaders of the Progressive Faculty Coalition, organized sessions with activist-educators from other schools in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. In the land of Paulo Freire (1921–97), author of the influential 1970 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the session title “Breaking Down the Ivory Tower: The University in the Creation of Another World” seemed especially appropriate. The proposal offered by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos in another session on education, for establishing a “counteruniversity” capable of disseminating high-quality knowledge, but without the elitism of traditional universities, also seemed apt.

In a very real sense, however, the WSF already functions as a “counteruniversity.” It was created to serve as “a pedagogical space for activists to learn what alternatives are being proposed and enacted around the world.” That’s how William Fisher and Thomas Ponniah put it in the introduction to their 2003 anthology of documents from the second WSF, Another World Is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum. Several of those documents focus on education “as a liberating tool,” insisting that it should not be “reduced to the status of a commodity” and affirming it as a universal human right—all ideas expressed by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Before the WSF began, I traveled with Global Exchange to Veranópolis, where we visited a school for future leaders of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra or Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). I spoke with some of its teachers—all young, idealistic, and hopeful. Some 4.5 million Brazilian peasants are landless; but since 1984, the MST has managed to help over 300,000 previously landless families gain legal ownership of small farms. Land reform has been far from peaceful, as the recent murder of seventy-three-year-old nun Dorothy Stang makes clear. The hired guns of some large landowners have also assassinated MST leaders and massacred groups of “squatters”—peasants waiting to come into legal possession of land ruled unproductive by the state. Among much else, the teachers at Veranópolis told me that Paulo Freire’s example and ideas are of major importance for the hopeful work they are doing.

During the opening event of the WSF, my colleagues and I were among the 200,000 who marched through the streets of Porto Alegre, representing hundreds of organizations ranging from Oxfam and Code Pink to Brazilian political parties. This demonstration was by far the largest—and perhaps the most hopeful—that I have ever participated in. Countless signs and colorful flags called for peace, human rights, environmental sustainability, and an end to corporate corruption and exploitation. This was Carnaval season, and our march was a carnival of causes, ideals, and hopes for the future of the planet. It ended in a huge amphitheater with a concert by bands from around the world—one of many musical events that have led some to liken the WSF to an “intellectual Woodstock.”

Official participants in this year’s WSF numbered 155,000, and the printed program was as enormous as the Sunday edition of the New York Times. One could hear speeches and presentations by Nobel laureates José Saramago and Adolfo Esquivel; by leaders of numerous nongovernmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Thirdworld Network; by liberation theologians such as Leonardo Boff; by social critics, including Medea Benjamin, Walden Bello, and Maude Barlow; by activist-educators such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, and Milton Fisk; by leaders of the campaign to end discrimination against the Dalits (“untouchables”) of India; by agrarian reformers, including the MST’s João Pedro Stedile; by trade union members and organizers; and by famous authors—Dennis Brutus, Eduardo Galeano, and Saramago among them. The offerings typically combined thorough research and expertise with calls to action for building fair trade networks or for protecting such global “commons” as water from further corporate exploitation.

During “Breaking Down the Ivory Tower,” we discussed making activism—work on behalf of a nongovernmental organization such as Global Exchange, for example—count as academic credit. Many universities in North America already have service-learning courses, and sometimes students can write for credit about their work for groups such as No Sweat or Jobs with Justice. Our suggestion is to expand such possibilities, perhaps in association with the Graduation Pledge campaign, which encourages students to seek jobs with socially responsible employers (http://www.graduationpledge.org).

We talked as well about getting our own institutions to become responsible investors, in line with the North American effort to make TIAA-CREF a more responsible investor of our retirement funds (http://www.makeTIAA-CREFethical.org). Working to establish fair labor practices on our campuses— living wage policies, for example—was another recommendation. We discussed the creation of more “peace studies” programs; there are perhaps a hundred of these in the United States, but we could use more. A full list of the “goals and objectives” the group considered should soon be available at the Web site of the new International Network of Scholar Activists (http://www.inosa.org).

The network is the result of another goal: that of forging more effective links among activist-educators around the globe to promote emancipatory ideas and knowledge. Such networking is already occurring among independent news media through the emergence of organizations like the WSF-related Association for Progressive Communications, which aims to share the best information available with its members and with the public. Though De Sousa Santos did not participate in our sessions, we were in essence discussing his proposal for a counter- university, whose hopeful curriculum would emphasize the issues of peace, global justice, environmental sanity, and international solidarity. Would such a curriculum be utopian? Of course! But isn’t education always about both individual and social betterment? Freire defined it as “the practice of freedom.”

For me, the most important lesson offered by the WSF is simply the strong sense of political hope and renewal expressed by all. The idealism of the many students I encountered was inspiring; it reminded me of the youthful enthusiasm for creating a better world that in the 1960s gave such an impetus to the civil rights and antiwar movements. Most of the young people I met through Global Exchange and at the WSF were working as either volunteers or employees for nongovernmental organizations such as Bioneers, Greenpeace, and Oxfam. Whatever their affiliations, they are all hopeful about the future and believe that their activism and the WSF can make a difference. I agree. In common with everyone I met in Porto Alegre, and perhaps especially the students, I agree with Kenyan activist Njoki Njehu that the WSF is “an inspiration for anyone who participates.” The executive director of Fifty Years Is Enough adds, “I can never be tired of advocating for social and economic justice.”

Patrick Brantlinger is James Rudy Professor of English, emeritus, at Indiana University.