Student Memory: What It Is & Why It Matters
Rena Yehuda Newman, Student Historian in Residence 2018 - 2019
Black Student Leaders Wahid Rashad, Harvey Clay, and others at Rally During UW Black Student Strike, February 1969
A song to listen to as you read: Archive, by Mal Blum
Student memory is a constant struggle. This is an axiom that every student organizer or worker knows intuitively. On college campuses, every four or five years means a complete turnover of knowledge. There is only a brief window for continuity. So, what does it mean to pass down memory in a place with such a transient population?
As a student historian, I’ve been researching the student activism of the 1960s Vietnam War era on UW-Madison’s campus. But there are significant gaps in the collections, namely, the voices of the student organizers who led the most major protest movements of their time, like the Black Student Strike. While it’s a relatively new phenomenon for archives to serve communities rather than powerful institutions, the same problem seems to be happening continually -- no one is documenting the campus activism of 2019.
Not only does this mean the erasure of student history, but also the continued forgetting of modern student memory, leaving each successive generation of students without context. This causes major problems for students engaged in social issues and policy change. Without memory of previous happenings and student-led initiatives, ideas and already-fought battles, students are at a severe disadvantage. Tireless hours by student activists can be undone. And if each year brings new amnesia, momentum is irrecoverably lost.
With this in mind, we have to ask: Who benefits from forgetting?
In my time as a student organizer, activism for or against new policies often feels like a race against the clock. I’ve heard time and time again that the administration and board of regents relishes a certain temporal safety. However awful a policy, however bad the student backlash, they can just wait it out until no student on campus remembers the time before. Those in power always benefit from public forgetting.
For example, in 2017 - 2018, University Housing unleashed a new mandatory meal plan without the input or consent of the student body, requiring all first years living in residential housing to pay an additional $1400 into WiscCard accounts, to be used exclusively for eating at the dining halls. This policy directly harmed low income students, students with eating disorders and dietary restrictions, and impacted students’ right to choose where and how they eat on campus. Major protests ensued all of last year, including an hour-long shutdown of UW’s most major dining hall. But many incoming freshman have no idea this policy is new, or that their fellow students spent countless hours fighting for an opt-out. Without a sense of memory, the student body is ill-equipped to advocate for itself and address harms they may experience but never be aware of.
Another example: in 2017, Governor Scott Walker tried to slash students’ ability to self-tax through allocable segregated fees, which would have effectively killed all of UW-Madison’s most major student organizations, many of which offer vital services for students like the Rape Crisis Center or the campus food pantry, The Open Seat. Students fought and won against this policy proposal, but the same issue could arise again. If students don’t know about this history of advocacy, the next time segregated fees are attacked, those future students will be forced to reinvent the wheel.
I want to bring together these two strands of maintaining student memory and recording student history. It seems that they are heavily dependent on each other -- if new students are given a sense of memory, “caught up to speed” with previous events on campus, all students benefit. I’m going to spend this spring collecting student materials to fill in the gaps. But I can’t do it alone, especially because as a white student, many of these are not my stories to tell.
We have so much to gain from remembering.
How should a student body organize against collective amensia?
Last week I presented to Associated Students of Madison (ASM), the UW-Madison student government about maintaining student memory. I believe student government can have an important role to play in creating workshops, sessions, and publications to educate students about their own past. Student government might also take it upon itself to do documentation work, creating folders full of posters and graphics and materials from recent organizing movements, especially on campuses where there isn’t a paid student historian to do this labor.
But this kind of documentation should happen at a grassroots level beyond student government. Student institutions and organizations have important roles to play, but are not representative. All students, especially students of marginalized identities, should keep records of themselves, write about their experiences, compile the materials of daily life and continuous struggle present in their time on campus. Creating “Disorientation Guides” to give to new students is useful. Though an individualist and professional culture usually means hoarding credit, fight back against this impulse by saying the names of fellow students and organizers who have also done the work. Create a folder on your computer of screenshots, receipts. Leave citations, make a record.
Collect for the future and fine ways to revive the past. Take opportunities in classes to research local historical student issues. Go dig around in your university’s archives. Ask for the wisdom of elders who have been around for a while. Tell the stories you learn, especially the stories that give you hope or create resilience in you -- make art about them, publish zines about them. Keep it alive.
Memory is protection against erasure. People and institutions of power will not record our stories, but we can. Create your files, archive your experiences. Make memory out of story then find a way to tell it. If you trust them, donate your materials to your local archive, especially university archvies. If you don’t, make your own. Either way, write it down. Collect it.
To all student activists engaged in the struggle: In fifty years, there may be a student wondering what their campus did during Trump Era America. Don’t let that story be written for you. Pick up your pen, fill up your boxes.
You are a historical subject, act like it.
- Rena Yehuda Newman (They/Them)
