This post is in reference to a Cornell Facebook group post on the anticipated end of free bus passes for incoming and first- and second- year graduate students students.
I don't think a protest will accept policy, especially because of the fairness issue highlighted by another post in this group.
If you want to get free bus passes, it would probably be a good idea to make a case for the cause based on economic as well as environmental impact. Cornell grads are pretty smart, know how to handle simple formulas in excel, conduct decent surveys, and do literature reviews.
To make the case, a few questions have to be asked:
If the Cornell bus pass is revoked...
1. how many grad students will decide not to purchase a bus pass?
- could probably do an electronic survey, with control group more senior grad students (confounding variable: effect of classes on need for frequent transportation to campus)
2. how many grad students would try to drive to campus instead?
- could probably do an electronic survey, with control group more senior grad students (confounding variable: effect of classes on need for frequent transportation to campus)
- important because of parking crunch, carbon emissions from cars;
3. How would this affect the price that TCAT can charge local businesses for its advertisements?
- a significant downturn in public transit usage would mean a smaller audience for bus ads, making them less valuable to local businesses/charities that advertise on the bus
4. How would this affect the frequency and range of bus routes?
- if the impacts were geographically or temporally localized, certain bus routes would close
- this could lead to secondary effects along the lines of (1), (2) and (3)
5. Using (1) and additional statistics on distance to campus of grad student residences and properties of cars typically owned by grad students (e.g. MPG), how much additional greenhouse gas (GHG) and other emissions would result?
- mitigated somewhat if certain bus lines close
- could quantify by assigning a somewhat arbitrary anticipated market rate for GHG emission per ton
6. Using (2), and possibly estimates of the increased wear and tear on cars and maintenance costs, how would the decrease in disposable income of grad students affect certain sectors of the local economy?
- gas stations and mechanics would benefit
- consumer retailers might lose slightly
- I doubt the elasticity of demand for these goods has been measured for grad students; can you generalize from studies of regional/national consumer behavior?
7. What is the cost of the Omnibus pass for the university for each graduating class?
- important to compare with the costs outlined above
Calculate all of these, and probably a few other things. Either the cost-benefit analysis will come out in favor of the free bus pass, or it won't. Even if it doesn't you could make an argument about certain externalities that haven't quite been internalized, such as
- damage to Cornell's reputation for being green
- damage to student-administration relation
- damage to school's reputation in community
- increased financial pressure for some members of the graduate community (e.g. humanities students more impacted than the engineers/scientists)
- lost productivity from grad students taking time away from research to organize, petition, conduct a cost-benefit analysis, negotiate with the administration...
Ok, what other options? Those listed on the website include -
picket
petition
A petition is easy, though I'm pessimistic about the ability of it working. It's better than nothing though - someone volunteer to draft the text, and someone be responsible for consolidating the petitions into one document after they have about 10 signatories each, vetting them for repeats.
A picket could happen, though my experience with protests is that (1) if you don't get enough people, they look really, really sad; (2) even if you get a lot of people, they tend to have credibility if the cause is (a) universal in its impact, and (b) have a clear opponent, (c) avoid the taint of self-interest, (d) are attended by individuals with credibility.
Weber cites three sources of legitimacy - charismatic, institutional, and traditional. The student protest depends heavily on the first, where charisma is understood to be a combination of passion and rationality (i.e., a Nobel Laureate is often better than a convicted felon). By their nature protests are not institutionalized, though the existing institutional framework may exist through a set of established advocacy/environmental organizations. Legitimacy from tradition has also been hindered because of the failure of the protest to become as part of student culture as it was during the Vietnam war, its perceived powerlessness to stop the Iraq war, and a culture (vis a vis France) that prefers the security of rule of law to the liberty and risk of frequent labor/student protests.
Quite frankly, if you can find someone who has the ability to get a crowd worked up about bus passes without coming off as self-serving or quixotic, such a talent is squandered in graduate study and should be readily employed in resurrecting American populism. With roughly one-half to two-thirds of the graduate community not standing to lose from this policy, it will be short work to exploit that division to give the appearance that the protesters are self-serving first- and second-year students. Therefore, I would conclude that charismatic legitimacy will be absent from a protest.
So what do you do? Barring insurgency, which at some level could have been reflected in the Redbud Woods 2005 incident, I believe you are left to operate within the system. Organize a coalition of businesses and community interests likely to be impacted, as determined from the analysis outlined above. Then go to President Skorton and the Board of Trustees to make your case. I would assume that most of this analysis has been done internally; the student case will be to claim that certain costs were not accounted for in the economic analysis, and that these are sufficient to warrant a change in the policy.
My two cents. I'm not a policy analyst, or even a particularly competent student of organizational behavior. I'm actually a burned-out volunteer who got tired of seeing people protest and go home, or let ego interfere with a cause or mission, instead of working toward long-term, incremental changes in culture and valuations through the creation of institutions and the painstakingly slow process of winning hearts and minds. Best wishes on your efforts.
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