Monologues in lectures and meaningless hashtags: how to be a student activist

What’s more annoying than students with fliers when you’re dashing to your 9am? Students with political fliers… and a long, narcissistic speech about saving the world.  

But if you’re not one of the 99% who desperately avoid eye-contact with these future Mother Theresas and hope they’ll pass unnoticed, here’s all the info you need to become a legitimate student activist.

Picking a cause

Just pick a cause. Any cause.

Well, not any cause. It’s got to be something Labour/Tory Party students can get all uppity about and spin into part of their political agenda. The Tories really care about cocoa farming in Tajikistan.

It’s also got to be something so obscure that you can’t do anything useful beyond “raising awareness”. Something you can hold a bake sale for and spend the £3.10 that you made on making a poster to put on your fridge. Something you can give a meaningless hashtag, like #21CenturiesOfOppression.

Make your cause political…even if all you really care about is protecting the rights of left-handed people

What to wear

Let’s face it, this is definitely the most important part of being a student activist. You can’t care about children’s rights if you don’t have a pink afro.

Firstly, you need to have done every weird and deeply unflattering thing possible to your hair. Your hair is a lump of clay, a blank slate on which you can symbolically represent your political views.

Have you ever rocked a beehive on one side and a buzzcut on the other side of your head? Then you’re a true Communist.

In fact, you should have hair in all the wrong places. If you’re a girl, shave your head and never deforest your pits. And bleach your moustache hair pink. Cos, y’know, fuck the patriarchy.

You’ve got to buy that scruffy orange vintage jacket from the 80s as soon as it appears in the independent shop. It’ll help reinforce your socialist identity – which is way more important than feeding 60 homeless people with all that money.

In fact, you should burn more money on nights out and pretentious coffees and the latest iPhone to take campaign selfies than on actually campaigning or donating. Your job is to show you don’t like the problem, not to actually help solve it.

Forget armchair activism, this is armpit activism

How to campaign

Sharing completely irrelevant articles on the society’s Facebook group counts as real activism.  So does wearing badges and ribbons.  You should own all the badges and ribbons.

Remember, you have the moral high ground.  This gives you the right to invade all other people’s Facebook conversations and call someone’s NoMakeUpSelfie sexist.

Have a bunch of default pickets and placards to grab for a last-minute protest.  They just need to say things like “I demand my human rights!” and “End the discrimination!”  That’s a sure-fire way to make a difference.

A seminar on the history of Christianity is definitely an appropriate place for your views on animal ethics.  And though they’ve heard your signature rant a thousand times already, they definitely want to hear it once more.  Those groans are groans of pleasure.

Getting asked to leave or escorted away by security is a badge of honour.  You’re a freedom fighter, a martyr to the cause.  You weren’t just being a colossal pain in the arse to everyone and stopping people from doing their actual work.

If all else fails, even picking somewhere on campus to hold up a few posters is really effective.  Just aim your protest towards apathetic students, don’t try approaching people who actually have any power.

Raising awareness’ totally counts as saving the world

Judging the “opposition”

If your friend’s also an activist, your campaigns necessarily go hand in hand, no matter how different they seem.  Russian homophobia is obviously best solved by tackling malaria in Kenya.

However, if a campaign is being run by someone you don’t know, it’s your duty to point out this random person’s cause is totally pointless, wasting time and money and probably sexist.

How can you tell if someone else’s campaign is worse than yours? Easy. Just check if they’ve got more supporters than you, if their clothes are more kooky and less mainstream than yours, and if they’re more middle class than you. Any one of those three and their cause is clearly worthless

My campaign’s better than yours.  See all my enthusiasm and my unsinkable action plan.

Your social life

Improving the world is an exhausting business and after a couple of hours of nodding at a poster about diversity, you’ll need to unwind.

Your usual watering hole is an independent pre-hipster midnight café that only serves some obscure ethically-sourced Moroccan bean coffee.  And your £4 was better spent on that thimble of ‘authentic’ coffee than donated to charity.

While you’re there, you need to theorise about Plato to back up your socialist/anarchist ideas.  And smoke a pipe and swill a glass of port with like-minded ‘intellectuals’.

Whenever you’re at a party, you ask about a person’s views on your chosen issue before you ask their name.  Drag them to a quiet room so you can have a proper debate without the irritatingly loud music and the distractions of people dancing and getting drunk.

Actually, why are you even going to parties attended by intellectually inferior students who just want to get drunk?  You should be holed up in a tent (sewn by the blind widows of Pakistan), listening to an up-and-coming New Age indie band and smoking weed.  (Bonus points if the weed’s in your pipe.)

The quiet corner of a house party gives you space to debate your views with those who are less informed

Your career

You’ve told everyone you’re going to work for a charity and never give up the activism.  And 20 years later, you’re still campaigning – to be elected into parliament.

Alternatively, you’re vowing to spend your life pulling water from a well in some remote Nepalese village.  You’ve made all the necessary plans – you actually have an Asian friend whose home country is near Nepal, so you could stay with them.

You’re really vocal about not putting it on your CV and only doing it because you genuinely care about your cause.  It just “slipped out” in your interview for a £20-an-hour Barclays internship… and twenty years later, it’s also winning you votes as a Labour MP.  Oops.

Won’t be long before you’re rubbing shoulders with the Westminster “elite”