Want to contribute? Share your part of our collective history here.

The Problem

University 
populations are necessarily transient. 
This weakens
 student 
activism; our 
movements 
and campaigns 
falter 
when 
members 
of 
our 
communities 
graduate, and when they leave, their 
knowledge 
of 
the 
university 
and 
activism 
leaves 
with 
them.
 The 
memory 
of 
our community 
is 
limited 
to 
a 
very 
small 
window, so
 we 
continually make 
the 
same 
mistakes 
and re-learn 
the 
same 
lessons.
 This prevents us from realizing or even knowing our potential power.

The Solution

To combat these problems and promote a stronger activist community, we want to gather the knowledge and expertise of student activists who have graduated or are nearly graduated. This can be in any form that you feel best expresses your experience. Personal essays, videos, illustrations, photos, and comics are all welcome. We want to preserve a history of activism at Maryland and pass on key information to future activists. Since we want this to last forever, we ask you to license your contribution under either the Creative Commons Attribution license, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, or the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.

A collection of activist experience would spark the imagination of future students to change their community while giving them the tools to do so.

The Call

We want you to share your personal experience at Maryland as well as your expertise and tactical knowledge. We want to create something between a handbook and a history for activism at UM.

Below are some questions to get you started (These questions don’t need to be addressed explicitly. They are just a jumping off point):

• Why did you get involved in activism?
• What were some of the successes your group achieved?
• How did you achieve them?
• What were some of the challenges you encountered?
• What would you have done differently?
• How did you change during your time here?
• How did the University change?
• What people/events/books/classes influenced you?
• What was your greatest defeat?
• What was your greatest victory?
• What is your greatest regret?
• Which professors/university officials/departments were allies? Which worked against you?
• What would you like to see happen on campus or elsewhere in the next 3-5 years?

Please include the year you graduated and what groups and campaigns you were involved in! Also, please include an e-mail address or other contact info so that people can follow up with you.

After the first 10 people have contributed, we will release the first printing of the Collective Histories Project book. We’ll update the PDF version every 5 versions afterwards, and hard copies will be available at the end of the Spring 2011 semester.

CLICK HERE to contribute your story!