We should never put down or insult people honestly trying to do good; I hope this premise doesn’t need much argument. If this is the case, why has Young Americans for Freedom drawn such widespread scorn upon itself?
Last semester, as anyone who was on campus (or Facebook) will remember, Hillsdale’s chapter of YAF kicked up a controversy over “meal plan reform.” The question of what YAF actually achieved with its rabble-rousing is best left to historians, but I have lingering concerns about how campus responded to this recent campaign and the abuse that YAF continues to suffer from many parts of campus.
During the flurry of petitions and meetings, I spent a few weeks reporting for the Collegian on YAF’s activities, and spent hours going back and forth between YAF leadership, Saga, Inc. workers and management, and the college administration.
It shouldn’t matter what you think of YAF’s vocabulary or their tactics. Everyone I encountered while reporting was kind and eminently concerned with making this campus better. It shouldn’t matter if their Obamacare comparisons are too simplistic or populist for you, or if past interactions with the organization make you roll your eyes at whatever they happen to do. YAF saw something wrong with campus and decided to make it better.
If we take what President Larry Arnn says seriously, we are all in a “partnership” in college, or if Josh Andrew ’14 had it right in his commencement address when he said we have all made the essential choice “To give ourselves to each other, to do this education together”, why did the term “YAFholes” ever cross my radar?
In last semester’s Collegian, Jessi Pope ’14 argued that YAF had no business spending time trying to change campus, that instead of gathering students together to discuss what could make our “partnership” better, YAF ought to have had “a night on the town” to discuss “more worthy causes” — things like “Ukraine or Obamacare.”
This sort of thinking strikes me as ridiculous. When we cast out as irrelevant, or even silly, honest concerns about the simple things that fill our everyday life — our food, housing, who we see, and how we spend our leisure — we disregard just how important they actually are. We cut out of our partnership the most basic things of our life. This can hardly be called “doing this education together,” unless we limit our “together” to the 12 to 18 hours we spend each week in the classroom.
All this, to run after this or that great idea or economic theory. We imagine that it’s more noble to work on fixing the nation or the world, to think up new tactics to spread some sacred “freedom” than it is to actually bother with what is most immediate to us.
In the end, nothing truly came of YAF’s campaigning. They had no way of knowing that comprehensive reform was already well underway, and now we have the same required meal plans they wanted to cut, but with much better food. All that is beside the point, however. Last semester, for a few weeks, Hillsdale had a sustained conversation about how to make a huge aspect of campus better, and the conclusion of many people was that it was all a waste of time. Better to stand back and complain about YAF’s inelegance and unthoughtful approach, then laugh and poke fun when they fail, than to join them in honestly trying to make campus better.
As for me, I’d prefer YAF sets their sights next on freedom from people too cool and causes too worthy to make our college better.
