Hillary Clinton speaks to college student interns this past summer for her campaign. PHOTO COURTESY OF VICTORIA HOUGHTALEN
Now only a year away from the 2016 elections, national campaigns are heating up and political activism at DePauw University looks to be relatively quiet.
However, while the majority of the students on campus aren’t politically active there are organizations for those who want to get their political fix, such as College Democrats and College Republicans. These organizations are working to get more students involved with politics, especially by encouraging students to vote.
Senior, and President of College Democrats, Megan Bailey said, “I definitely think that we should be more involved with the process of political activism because voting is what really gets us different results; locally, on the state level, and on the national level. That is the most basic form of civic participation.”
Senior John Marwede, a leader within College Republicans believes that there’s a large portion of DePauw students that are uninformed about politics in general and have avoided the world of politics as opposed to getting involved. But, it is possible that campus involvement in politics is growing.
“We have more members now than we had when I was a freshmen so we are attracting more and more students to get involved to discuss these things,” said Marwede. “I think that there's still a very large margin of the student body that could get more involved. I don't know if it's just because they are not aware that these groups exist or they keep their opinions to themselves, it's kind of hard to gage that.”
Even with these limited outlets for political discussion, some students on campus feel that the political groups DePauw does have don’t contribute enough to generate a political reaction from the student body.
DePauwlitics radio show host on WGRE (4-5 p.m. Wednesday) Mickey Terlep said, “I don't see College Democrats and College Republicans making such a big difference.”
Terlep said that at DePauw issues of social justice have taken forefront in the last two years.
The political activism on DePauw’s campus leans toward social activism.
"I think political activism on DePauw's campus is definitely different than what the national standard would be," said sophomore Victoria Houghtalen
Houghatalen interned with Hillary Clinton this summer and is a Prindle Institute for Ethics intern.
Regarding DePauw’s level of activism she said, “Where other campus's are focused on the primary election we're more focused on our campus climate; which is still politics so I think we're very politically active.”
She explained that this has to do with relevance because students feel campus climate and campus inclusion issues everyday and get involved in them. However, she does see a possible issue with only focusing on social activism.
“The fact that certain identities can't get involved in certain institutions, that may be because we don't read the news as much, because we don't vote as much. We tend to disengage from that but it’s very relevant,” said Houghtalen. “It’s interesting how the conversations here are mimicked on a national scale, but we don't bridge that as a university.”