In the summer of 2007, University of Pennsylvania student Alexander McCobin was running “a pro-liberty group on campus” when he realized there was no likeminded national organization to help him and his members.
Later, while interning in Washington, McCobin “met several other students who ran their own libertarian student groups.” They put together a “small, roundtable discussion on best practices for student organizing,” which was followed by a “slightly larger conference” in New York City, with an expected attendance of about 30 people. Instead, over 100 participants from 42 schools in three countries attended.
At that point, McCobin explains, “We realized there was a huge market demand for resources during the year to help pro-liberty student groups. From there we decided to turn that one-time conference into a non-profit organization and it’s just been growing ever since.”
Thus was born Students for Liberty. McCobin, now a graduate student in philosophy at Georgetown University and the organization’s president, recently spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about S4L’s brief history and prospects for its future.
‘Principles of liberty’
Students for Liberty, he explained, focuses “on the principles of liberty. We really want to educate students on the foundations of a free society, things like economic freedom to provide for your life, academic freedom, and social freedom to choose how to live your life.” Once the basics are addressed, he added, “we encourage debate and discourse on the applications [of those principles] to various policy issues.”
To support its mission, Students for Liberty helps campus groups “by providing resources like free books [and] speakers to come to campus,” McCobin said, “as well as organizing conferences, primarily to get students to meet leaders of liberty and interact with one another, [and] to help train them to be better leaders of liberty on their campus.”
McCobin said he and his colleagues have one central piece of advice they give to those starting pro-liberty campus groups.
“The biggest advice that we give to everyone,” he said, is to “find other people who are pro-liberty to get involved and work with you. The biggest hindrance to the student liberty movement historically has been people not knowing that there is a reason to get organized and that there is a way for them to do so.”
Following on that advice, the national organization provides “some tips on how to start up groups and resources to help them out, but” success, he said, is “all about having the initiative and the support of other students on campus to make it happen.”
CPAC controversy
McCobin ran into some minor (but not troublesome) controversy not long after Students for Liberty began.
“At last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference -- the 2010 conference -- I was invited to speak on a panel on ‘saving freedom across America.’ That was the first year CPAC had allowed GOProud,” a gay conservative group, “to be a sponsor of the event.”
McCobin began his speech that day “by thanking CPAC for that decision [to include GOProud] and was met with a combination of boos from a handful of people and applause from most of the audience.”
He said he “continued to thank CPAC and explained why this was the right move if you actually support ‘saving freedom across America,’ but another speaker [Ryan Sorba of Young Americans for Freedom] afterwards came up and criticized the American Conservative Union for allowing GOProud to be there and was booed off stage. We had a bit of a controversy there but it didn’t require much defense by us because I think we were pretty clearly on the right side of the issue.”
‘Community organizers for liberty’
Students for Liberty has a long-range view of its future.
“We’re looking beyond next year,” McCobin said.
“We’re looking to five and ten years from now. Our plan is to grow and reach more students. We have the campus coordinator program, where we select high-quality student leaders to be community organizers for liberty in their area. We’ve doubled the size of that for next year to 60 students. We’re going to be running eleven regional conferences across the United States.”
With growth from 250 to 429 affiliated groups (including 23 on Virginia campuses), McCobin expects its next international conference, scheduled for February 2012 in Washington, D.C., “is going to be much bigger than last year.”
Also on SFL's agenda is the launch of a European Students for Liberty network, which had its inaugural meeting in London earlier this summer.
“At this point,” McCobin noted, “we just are trying to keep up with demand from students to help as many of them out as we can.”
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