Collective inaction

Fueled by a benevolent (and munificent) USG projects board, our campus is home to hundreds of student organizations, servicing every niche community and championing every possible political cause. The end of summer marks a new wave of freshmen being fed into the system, from club fairs to open houses, fliers to Facebook invites. The desire to fill one’s free time fighting global ills is a laudable goal. Yet if one cares about doing important work well, there are compelling reasons to avoid many of these groups.

Most will admit, privately, that few organizations on campus do truly important work (except their own, of course). Students often go through the motions of holding meetings, planning events, electing officers, arguing about official positions and inventing fanciful titles and responsibilities, all without properly considering the productivity of their efforts. Students who want to make a difference should pick problems that are reasonable for undergraduates. The Daily Princetonian, for example, rightly advises its writers to avoid national topics that are being covered more expertly by professional journalists. To disregard this suggestion risks both inefficiency and embarrassment.

An early discovery in economic theory was the concept of comparative advantage: It is most efficient for everyone to do the work that they are better at than others. Spanish speakers should be the ones teaching “English as a Second Language” in Trenton because others cannot. Premeds can serve as EMTs and medical coordinators for Outdoor Action.

It is more important that the work be effective than the cause magnificently important. Tutoring students in Trenton is more feasible than preventing AIDS in Africa, and Princeton students are better equipped to tutor. Because the effectiveness of a tutoring program can be more easily measured, it is less likely that efforts will be wasted. Princeton students’ time might be better spent addressing campus sexual violence through organizations such as SHARE rather than lobbying Congress to strengthen the Violence Against Women Act because we are in the best position to understand and fix local problems. “Every little bit counts” is a dangerous argument that completely disregards the scarcity and value of your time.

The Princeton Equality Project, a new campus organization devoted to gay rights, should serve as an example for other advocacy groups.

One of the organization’s goals is to perform the first true survey of Princeton’s gay population. This initiative strikes me as a perfect example of important work being done by the right people. PEP is in a great position to aid Princeton’s LGBT students because many of them are represented in the membership. Additionally, reliable data on the gay population will inform future initiatives and maybe even University policy. Finally, if they don’t do it, it is unlikely anyone else will. It is a bad sign if the work you are doing could or would have been done without you, which is probably the case with initiatives like group letter writing.

Finally, forming groups is often less effective than individual action. For example, the organization Tigers for Israel has rightly or wrongly developed a reputation for intransigence and extreme ideological positions. Yet individually, I find the members are far more willing to concede ideological points and acknowledge their doubts and true opinions. I always leave these private conversations more convinced of their positions because of this honesty, and in my case their efforts are actually more effective uncoordinated.

I find groups that form to promote awareness of a single issue dubious for similar reasons.

There are a great number of very important issues for which universal awareness is simply infeasible. I, for example, am very interested in Senate treaty ratification, specifically the practice of attaching Reservations, Understandings and Declarations, unilateral interpretations that absolve us of our explicit international obligations and leave treaties in a legal limbo. Fixing this process is in my opinion a prerequisite to addressing any international issue that requires coordination, from proliferation to climate change.

Yet is it desirable or feasible that every Princeton student know this? Not really.

Those who need to know a particular fact are the ones who hold incorrect opinions due to their ignorance of it. It would be ridiculous to hold a RUD-awareness week, but if a Wilson School major remarked in conversation that Obama is solely to blame for shirked international obligations, I could correct that person.

This good citizenship is a better means of promoting awareness than coordinated efforts. If you care about an issue, educate yourself about it thoroughly so that when you find something that needs to be done or someone who needs to be informed, you can do it. And if you must coordinate action through an organization, look again to PEP’s example. Rather than waste time meeting as a whole, PEP more frequently meets in small groups devoted to addressing a single and doable task. This federated structure allows interested students nearly free reign to address problems as they see fit with minimal autocracy.

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Princeton’s students are some of the hardest working and compassionate I have ever known. Among the student body, there is probably nearly universal consensus on how to address many issues. Yet we must not let self-importance breed inefficiency. By picking our battles and more carefully pooling our efforts, we have the potential to solve problems of enormity with efficiency.

Allen Paltrow is a sophomore from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.