Part1
The story of the Coop, Part 1:
Mark's inauspicious activist roots and how nothing came to be.
Mark Egerman to Benjamin Saalbach-Walsh, Nov 9, 2006 3:38 AM
Any history of The Co-op has to start with the underdeveloped state of CMU activism that necessitated all that follows. Carnegie Mellon had long been one of the least political active schools of its caliber, frequently ranking high on all of those meaningless but somewhat accurate Princeton Review-esque surveys that measured apathy. In the nineties there was something that resembled Earth (since merged with Sustainable Students, a Co-op project) and a USAS (United Students Against Sweatshops) chapter (which eventually became PWR through a Co-op founder) and little else on campus. The main activist group on campus at the time was Student Activist HeadQuarters (SAHQ). SAHQ published an activist newsletter called The Student Union, on and off for over a decade. I wrote a history of The Student Union in 2005 for The Tartan, and I collected all of the old issues and started a library in The Tartan's office if anyone is interested.
Needless to say, The Student Union and SAHQ were anemic organizations at best that tried to coordinate student interest across a broad spectrum of issues and a broader spectrum of students. When I arrived on campus in the fall of 2000, things didn't look good. One student had started a Green Party chapter to support Nader (It later became the Progressive Student Alliance) and there was SAHQ, which was comprised solely of seniors (Luke Brindle among them) and one fifth year scholar (Paul Jacobs) and managed to put out one issue of the Student Union that year. It would be the last one ever. I joined up with SAHQ interested in getting involved and found there was little involvement to be had. I include names, because these individuals played an important role in my development as an activist and I think it's important to give credit where credit is due.
By the end of the year, SAHQ tried to organize a general teach-in to raise student awareness. I was one of the student speakers, and we got Scott Sandage, Indira Nair, Mark Stehlik, Kathy Newman, and others to talk about the issues facing CMU, from apathy to anti-intellectualism, to unionization, to anti-racist actions, and so on. It was a pretty pitiful event and it marked the end of SAHQ. Everyone graduated, leaving me with a stack of old Student Unions and no direction.
So I decided that it was time to bury SAHQ and work to build a new consensus on campus. PSA had been going strong as had USAS, which had been working on a code-of-conduct to prohibit sweatshop labor in the manufacture of CMU branded apparel. I contacted the leaders of these organizations, The Women's Center, ALLIES, and other groups, and tried to start a new coalition. We were to be called Crowded Fire, from the invocation at the start of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book: Freedom of speech is the right to shout theater in a crowded fire.
The idea of Crowded Fire was simple: instead of subsuming all activism under a single banner, diverse groups should work together to support each other's agendas as well as work together towards a common goal. After a few rocky meetings (I had no idea what I was doing, to be honest), I got people to sign on for a group campaign. We were going to campaign to "open the books." Demanding more financial transparency from Warner Hall was seen to be in everyone's interests. Not only did we want more information on the military contracting being performed by the school, specifically the SEI, we wanted to know why student organizations were starved for money, why H&SS was underfunded, how much various Deans had in discretionary spending, etc.
So we plastered the campus with fliers and posters, made banners, let everyone know that the kickoff to this campaign was going to mark a new era in Carnegie Mellon activism. This may have been the best PR campaign in years, the whole campus was swmped with info. Everyone knew that a new kind of activism was going to begin on the first day of our new campaign. Yes, everyone was going to fill McConomy to see our amazing presentation on September 11th, 2001.
Oops.
In retrospect, how could we have known? The campaign was ultimately called off owing to the events of the day. Yet we had the machinery to move forward with a very effective pro-peace movement that kicked into effect right away. I'll talk more about this in part two. PSA would make moderate gains in opening the books three years later, but that's beside the point. What's worth noting is that had the event gone forward, we would have failed miserably, as I was entirely unprepared for a campaign of that size and had put so much time into getting people together that I hadn't bothered to make a workable strategic plan. Furthermore, Crowded Fire had been all about me and that alone had doomed it from the beginning. While I had reached out to other groups, I had inhereted SAHQ as a one-man mission, which not only was not sustainable, but would present problems down the road. I was a Sophmore and overly eager, cut me some slack.
I did learn something important about CMU activism, however. Crowded Fire died before it had a chance to start, but it would finally get success through the Co-op, which shared the same basic principle: The most effective form of campus activism is to get a bunch of passionate people together under a loose framework to help out with each others' issues. It would be almost two years before I moved into The Co-op and finally realized this goal, but things had started. Just as importantly, I learned that one person cannot sustain an organziation alone and that I personally was particularly bad at this, as I would end up polarizing the already-too-small activist community. Nonetheless, The Co-op did not start in a vacuum, but rather it was the continuation of a tradition of CMU activist groups. But things changed very quickly those days and if we weren't careful, we were never going to get an activist community of the ground.
The story of The Co-op is one giant leap of faith and it still amazes me to this day. My closest friends are people I met through The Co-op and I will always be proud of what we did. I cannot stress this enough.
Mark