The Apathy Myth

This piece and image originally appeared on page 10 of Lot’s Wife Edition 6, 1996.

I know it’s a cliché, but if I had a dollar for every time someone made a despairing remark to me about student apathy, I’d be a rich woman. And to continue in the vein of my high-brow introduction, I will quote those masters of satire and cynicism, TISM; “I’m interested in apathy.”

Apathy is regarded as the bane of student activists and student poli­ticians everywhere. It is defined as insensibility, indifference and mental indolence. Its tangible manifestations include lower voter turnout during student elections, small rallies, ignorance about education/social issues, and inquorate Student General Meetings. Apathy also laid the perfect foundations for the introduction of Voluntary Student Unionism. Gov­ernments and University Administrations rely on student apathy to push through regressive and undemocratic changes to higher education policy. During the recent media frenzy attracted by the closure of Lot’s Wife, many journalists noted the lack of passion and activism amongst students of the 1990s. If we rewound the clock by thirty years, the loss of a student newspaper would have generated mass outrage and probably militant ac­tion by the student population – a far cry from the comparatively muted protests of our generation.

Apathy is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people say that students don’t care, don’t understand, don’t want to know, they are, by implications, saying that we should not bother with them, that to expend any energy on a particular issue would be a waste of time. But if students are written off as apathetic, they are never given the opportunity to prove themselves otherwise, and so the cycle continues.

Often saying that students are apathetic is just a way of avoiding the hard work needed to get a campaign off the ground. Some people say that the issues are too complicated, that students won’t understand, or that you can’t expect students to get their head around them. I believe this is selling students short, and it says more about the people who articu­late those theories than it does about students themselves. Such people have no faith in student organisations. After the first Student General Meeting for the year at which an overwhelming (but inquorate) majority voted that the Monash Student Association withdraw from the funding agreement binding it to compliance with Voluntary Student Unionism, it was said by many office-bearers that students didn’t know what they were voting for, or understand its implications. Partly, this reasoning was a justification for ignoring the SGM motion and largely avoiding the difficult issues it raised. It was also a thinly veiled attack on the group of activists who worked very hard to make the SGM happen, and to ensure that students did understand what was going on. Ironically, these office-bearers have internalised the notion of apathy, a thing which they constantly complain about, and then use as a weapon against students, to either undermine something they have done or decided, or to deprive them of the information they need. Such reactions from our student association facilitates a deeper, more hardened kind of apathy amongst students – cynicism.

In many instances, the people who complain about student apathy are the ones in a position to do something about it. Stu­dents need to be inspired, informed and treated like intelligent adults rather than sheep to be herded into polling booths during election week. Any person who is involved with the student associa­tion has a respon­sibility to work actively for, and more importantly, with students. Yes it can be an uphill battle, and it is often a thankless job, but if the MSA lacks the support and the interest of students, it is a grave dug not only by Kennett’s anti-student unionism legislations, but by a litany of office-bearers who failed to use their posi­tions in a constructive and inclusive way.

Another theory penned in 1969 by C. Davidson, is that “apathy is the unconscious recognition students make of the fact they are power­less”. There is probably some truth to this; many students of the nineties seem to have internalised this notion of powerlessness on a more con­scious level. They merely throw up their hands in despair when some­thing goes wrong, as if that is justification for why they failed to show any interest in the issue or the thing in the first place. However, all is not lost. Power is relative. We may not be able to kick Jeff Kennett out of Spring Street (and you thought we was going to decriminalise marijuana – suck­ers), but we do have the power to storm the rotunda when he makes his annual visit to Monash. Students have won concessions on reforms in the past, through lobbying and through direct action on the streets and in universities. The most important thing we have is the power to question, to criticise, to challenge and to learn. We don’t just have to be passive pawns in a game played by student political hacks or politicians of the State and Federal variety.

So are we Monasharians really irretrievably apathetic? We rarely get more than one bus load (usually only half a bus) of students going to rallies in the city. But on the other hand, Monash has a proud tradition of highly attended Student General Meetings with usually at least 300 and a few times in the past few years over 1000 students participating. This SGM culture is the envy of office-bearers and activists at other campuses who can only marvel at it, as for example at Melbourne Uni and RMIT they’re lucky to get 200 people to an SGM.

Many Monash students walk around this campus as if blindfolded, they don’t look at posters, they don’t get involved in extra-curricular ac­tivities. And they don’t read this newspaper. That’s their loss. But I know from experience that if you approach any given group of people or any individual with something concrete to say, or for them to do, the majority do take some form of interest. So those of you subscribing to the apathy theory, get out there and give others a reason to take notice. To those who would put themselves in the apathetic basket, pop the bubble that your life is and you never know what you may learn or who you will meet. We may not be about to have a revolution, and Monash has certainly changed a lot since its radical hey-days in the late 60s and early 70s, but I like to think there is hope for us yet.