NEW ORLEANS, La. — Nov. 11th, 2025
When we talk about the American Nation as the union of all of those oppressed in this country, it may seem easy to write it off as an abstract concept wrapped in hollow theory. However, it is of paramount importance to note that when we are discussing the Nation we are discussing her not as some chimera that has no bearing on reality, but as the demonstrated reality of the United States of America. And nowhere is our Nation more present than on a university's campus. Here at Loyola University New Orleans— or quite frankly at any university— we are constantly presented with new people, ideas, opportunities, and identities that may have been unseen or heard of elsewhere. It is not mistake that reactionary forces in the United States must make a public spectacle of ridiculing "campus radicals" and the new identities that students adopt prior to their ascent into the so-called "real" world. It is on the university campus, that we see the closest thing to a present-day socialism, for the new union of the American Dream is present right here on St. Charles Street in New Orleans.
Consider the following: on a university campus, human beings are fed, housed, employed, and educated. Students live and build communities not dissimilar to the Khrushcevkas of the Soviet Union— an entire neighborhood community built in a replicable, close environment where leisure, work, school, and home life could be conducted all within a 15 minute walk of each other. In addition to the physical similarities to past socialism, university campuses have and thrive on diversity of backgrounds and identities. For an example, take the demographic makeup of Loyola University New Orleans, it is made of 53% ethnic minorities, and each constituent community takes pride in their heritage and brings to the university ideas, issues, and experiences that have not previously been considered.
Now this isn't to claim that universities are perfect, of course, for they are still subject to the contexts of the societies in which they exist. University students, undergraduate and graduate-level are both (a) subject to anti-democratic processes under administrations that seek to extract profits from their studies and (b) exploited as reserve of cheap labor by corporations and the universities themselves to run many of the so-called "unskilled" sectors of society that are no less essential or economically valuable. On point (a), student governments— while very important— are still fundamentally at mercy to the amount of democracy that is awarded to them based on the whims of an elected and directly unaccountable administration. An administration that— in the context of point (b)— is concerned primarily with increasing revenue for the university and maintaining the status quo that grants them power, status, and wealth. Whereas universities can serve as the model for a truly democratic society, the students are still fundamentally a marginalized nation existing under a form of undemocracy that is inherently extractive and exploitative.
However, it is in this that we can identify another dualism— a positive and negative existing simultaneously. The question then becomes, What is to be done? With a simple answer: that students, as a creolized nation— a nation of nations— must unite to democratize their campuses and insist that the power that the university has only through their participation, is returned to them. The underlying systemic issues of the reactionary government of the United States of America can be seen plainly and in small scales on the university campus and must be obliterated. Students have already begun this process by uniting into organizations and simply talking to each other. Through organizations such as the Palestinian Youth Movement, Student Peace Initiative, Loyola's Society for Civic Engagement, and of course Students for Democratic Society, students are— in mass numbers— choosing to create participatory democracy. Whether fighting against the imperialist invasions of Viet Nam or Iraq, or hikes that make their tuition unaffordable, or for the protection of queer and ethnically marginalized students, or even against the genocide against the Palestinian Nation, the students, when united, have never been proven wrong. In my personal opinion, the vanguard of the students are those Students for a Democratic Society, and it is using them and other revolutionary student organizations as a model that the American Dream will be actualized on our campuses and in our country. If the students can democratize their universities despite all pushback and violence from administrations and police, then the American Nation can democratize the whole country.
