[Background: Spent time in a student chapter of the Federalist Society, and in somewhat Cru-like organizations, in the 2000s. My perspective is doubtless somewhat out of date, especially on FedSoc.]
Ours is not the first movement to see campus organizing as an important avenue for making an impact. We have considered several other campus organizing structures as models from which we can learn best practices for building a university movement.
Although looking at other movements is helpful, I would emphasize that each of them has a somewhat different theory of impact, special constraints, and target audience. Modeling after an existing successful movement may backfire if these factors do not align adequately. There are many different theories of impact that I think a campus animal-advocacy group could follow, and the lessons I might draw from other successful organizations would be pretty different based on the desired theory.
The other reaction I have to this report is curiosity: as a historical matter, why did the previous organizations at these institutions fail? Ideally, we would ask former organizers, although that could be fairly time-consuming.
I’ll add a few points on Cru and FedSoc, mainly because I have more experience with them than most people here.
Cru is hardly the only game in town for Christian college organizations. Obviously, it has been able to scale well, but in my view one has to keep in mind that its model does not work well everywhere. For instance, at the university where I attended law school, Cru was the big group for undergraduates, but the graduate schools had their own groups that were very much student-directed and only loosely affiliated with another large campus organization (InterVarsity). We didn’t use InterVarsity branding, Bible studies, etc. I don’t think the Cru model would have worked well in the graduate schools, either. So the extent to which I would draw from Cru as a potential model would depend on whether my theory of impact flowed more through graduate or undergraduate students. FedSoc was also very student-driven at the individual chapter level; if the student leaders were executing a plan cooked up by national leadership, they did a good job keeping that from me!
While I don’t really have an opinion on branding and consistency in the animal-advocacy context, there are some powerful reasons for Cru to find them particularly important that may not transfer over here. One of them is that $600MM doesn’t raise itself, and your donors (and prospective staff members, who often join soon after college) need to have confidence that they know what they are contributing toward. Also, if you’re a student or parent with Cru-aligned or adjacent beliefs, there’s significant value in the Cru name as a signal of safety. In fact, you’d have some concerns that a seemingly-innocent but unknown Christian group might actually be a cover for an outfit you think heretical, or even for a destructive cult.[1] Attracting already-seriously-Christian kids is at least integral to Cru’s theory of impact (and even those from non-Christian backgrounds can more easily discern that a consistent, branded org like Cru is not a destructive cult than an unbranded org).
Another piece of the secret sauce—at least in my experience—was a pretty open and welcoming atmosphere. My FedSoc chapter had a good number of moderates, conservatives, and libertarians who all got along, and always invited liberal speakers to participate in panels and such. Good ones, too. Although I consider myself a moderate, that was a major reason I ended up getting involved (also because I wanted to hear both sides of legal debates and the school’s faculty clearly leaned left). The Christian group I was in during undergrad had a significant number of non-Christians, people who were raised Christian but were questioning it, and people who were much more casually Christian than the campus minister involved. Creating a broad-tent organization along those lines comes with certain advantages and certain drawbacks.
[Background: Spent time in a student chapter of the Federalist Society, and in somewhat Cru-like organizations, in the 2000s. My perspective is doubtless somewhat out of date, especially on FedSoc.]
Although looking at other movements is helpful, I would emphasize that each of them has a somewhat different theory of impact, special constraints, and target audience. Modeling after an existing successful movement may backfire if these factors do not align adequately. There are many different theories of impact that I think a campus animal-advocacy group could follow, and the lessons I might draw from other successful organizations would be pretty different based on the desired theory.
The other reaction I have to this report is curiosity: as a historical matter, why did the previous organizations at these institutions fail? Ideally, we would ask former organizers, although that could be fairly time-consuming.
I’ll add a few points on Cru and FedSoc, mainly because I have more experience with them than most people here.
Cru is hardly the only game in town for Christian college organizations. Obviously, it has been able to scale well, but in my view one has to keep in mind that its model does not work well everywhere. For instance, at the university where I attended law school, Cru was the big group for undergraduates, but the graduate schools had their own groups that were very much student-directed and only loosely affiliated with another large campus organization (InterVarsity). We didn’t use InterVarsity branding, Bible studies, etc. I don’t think the Cru model would have worked well in the graduate schools, either. So the extent to which I would draw from Cru as a potential model would depend on whether my theory of impact flowed more through graduate or undergraduate students. FedSoc was also very student-driven at the individual chapter level; if the student leaders were executing a plan cooked up by national leadership, they did a good job keeping that from me!
While I don’t really have an opinion on branding and consistency in the animal-advocacy context, there are some powerful reasons for Cru to find them particularly important that may not transfer over here. One of them is that $600MM doesn’t raise itself, and your donors (and prospective staff members, who often join soon after college) need to have confidence that they know what they are contributing toward. Also, if you’re a student or parent with Cru-aligned or adjacent beliefs, there’s significant value in the Cru name as a signal of safety. In fact, you’d have some concerns that a seemingly-innocent but unknown Christian group might actually be a cover for an outfit you think heretical, or even for a destructive cult.[1] Attracting already-seriously-Christian kids is at least integral to Cru’s theory of impact (and even those from non-Christian backgrounds can more easily discern that a consistent, branded org like Cru is not a destructive cult than an unbranded org).
Another piece of the secret sauce—at least in my experience—was a pretty open and welcoming atmosphere. My FedSoc chapter had a good number of moderates, conservatives, and libertarians who all got along, and always invited liberal speakers to participate in panels and such. Good ones, too. Although I consider myself a moderate, that was a major reason I ended up getting involved (also because I wanted to hear both sides of legal debates and the school’s faculty clearly leaned left). The Christian group I was in during undergrad had a significant number of non-Christians, people who were raised Christian but were questioning it, and people who were much more casually Christian than the campus minister involved. Creating a broad-tent organization along those lines comes with certain advantages and certain drawbacks.
I mean stuff like—at the extreme end—the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ that ended up in mass murder-suicide under Jim Jones.