The Iguana Calls

Dear Alternative Orange:

Thanks for sending your paper for the last few months. I hope the money holds out to keep up this exchange. You should have been getting copies of The Iguana. [The Iguana is a student publication from the University of Florida at Gainesville. We have copies of it and other publications from other campuses, all of which can be looked at in the A.O.’s office. -Editor]

I enjoy your letters section because it offers a view of the current fights on campus. I like the spirit of the covers, the contradictions they illustrate, and a lot of the art and cartoons inside. (Ahem, except the 1/92 cover art. It may have gotten by in ’78, but didn't you know that Wonder Woman was a CIA spy?)

But it strikes me that your paper is really very academic in style and content. I have trouble relating the articles in it to my own experience or the experience of movements I’ve been in or studied. (The exceptions are Evelyn Sell’s article—not that I agree with it—and some of the NLNS [New Liberation News Service -Editor.] pieces). I wonder if this is because your funding is threatened if you organize with the paper. (At U.F., Student Goverment funds cannot go to specifically political organizations. Of course, The Iguana gets no S.G. funds.)

I also wonder who your audience is. Do students at Syracuse understand difficult academic jargon, such as “social production of difference,” “subjectivities,” “textualization”? If they don’t understand these terms—assuming they have the time and desire to—how can they find out what you mean? As I read many of your articles I have the feeling that the simple is made complex, the clear is made difficult, and the genuinely difficult ideas don’t have examples to reader.

A lot of what you say seems to be radical in that it demands fundamental change. But who will make this change and how is it to be made? Is what you call “critical-oppositional politics” the same or different from what I call “people’s movements?” As you and I know from studying our history, students have played an important role in the Movement. We’ve done research to expose the power structure, we’ve learned and taught our true history and the current conditions of people’s lives in this country. For example, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was sparked by the arrests of students trying to spread information about—and raise money for—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We’ve demanded student power over the university, free education for all who want it. We’ve fought against the use of “acababble” and demanded that the university serve the role of getting history and ideas out in a usable form to people’s movements.

If you think the student role has changed, you need to say why you think that is.

Since you are familiar with constructive criticism, I hope you will take this letter as such.

Dare to struggle,
Jenny Brown, The Iguana