Why strike?

Here are some of my personal motivations. I am studying social work.

I spend my time attending classes, interning at a local homeless resource center, operating a nonprofit organization for individuals with disabilities and advocating for children in the child welfare system.

All these activities involve working with individuals who lack opportunity.

A college education has become a privilege in our society. In the past 30 years, the cost of a college degree in the United States has increased 1,120 percent. National student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt.

Personally, I demand an academic environment where the workers who clean the desks know their children can one day sit in them and where those children know they will have a legitimate and recognized voice in the governance of their university.

Please refrain from shaking your head, sighing and telling me to be “grateful for my
education.”

I am a scholarship kid. Generous donors pay for me to receive my unaffordable education.

I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given but not for the state of higher education in Indiana.

You would never dismiss a woman’s fight for equal wages by telling her to be “grateful that she has a job,” right?

You would never dismiss the fight of a man who uses a wheelchair for an elevator in his college dorm by telling him to be “grateful that he has been admitted,” right?

Dismissing resistance to outrageous tuition rates and governing policies at IU by telling students to be “grateful” for their education is both pacifying and insulting to individuals fighting for gains in other areas of state oppression.

Please refrain from crossing your arms and telling me that a strike inhibits your choice to attend the classes for which you’re paying money.

Take a step back with me and see yourself as part of a larger environment that contains thousands of individuals who never had the choice to attend college because they could never afford it.

Maybe their parents missed the 21st Century Scholars deadline or their incomes dove after enrollment periods ended.

Maybe they immigrated here as children, are living without documentation and cannot receive in-state tuition.

Maybe their rural high school lacked college resources, and they never saw a scholarship application.

When I strike, I will choose to inhibit your choice to attend class in order to advocate for the thousands of others less privileged than you and me. 

In the 1970s, close to 10,000 IU students boycotted classes to oppose state cuts to public education and IU’s tuition hike.

Just this past spring, hundreds of thousands of students took to the streets in Quebec to resist rising tuition.

There will be a strike on IU’s campus on April 11 and 12, the dates of the Board of Trustees meeting. In the most literal sense, we cannot afford to be passive.

I hope you will join me.  

­— Samantha Harrell
sjharrel@indiana.edu