Activist-academia

I talk a lot about "activist-academics", but what other word can you use when a professor is literally recruiting young people, training them in the ways of temperance and teaching them how to lobby politicians?

 

High School Students Learn Activism and Policymaking through SPH Initiative 

David Jernigan leads the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded to prepare young people to address pressing issues.

 

This guy has got 60 Massachusetts high schoolers "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers."

 

In the three months before the visit, Jernigan, professor of health law, policy, and management at BU’s School of Public Health, drilled them in democracy and alcohol policy via Zoom and an in-person training at BU, assisted by Hannah Martuscello (SPH’26). 

It’s the second year that Jernigan has recruited young activists from the Massachusetts Alcohol Policy Coalition, a statewide coalition of school- and community-based preventive healthcare programs he cofounded.  

 

How very academic. 

 

David Jernigan is a sociologist working at Boston University School of Public Health. He has over 200 publications to his name, mostly pushing neo-temperance policies. Examples of his efforts to extend the field of human knowledge include Alcohol Problems and Policies: the States Have the Power, But Will They Use It?, Strengthening Advocacy Skills for Public Health Leaders, and Media advocacy: lessons from community experiences.

 

“I grew up steeped in the Christianity of witness to injustice,” he says. “And the more I got into alcohol research, the more obvious it was to me: this is a huge injustice that’s being perpetrated.” 

 

In 2000, he became friends with Derek Rutherford who took the pledge at the age of 9 and has said: "In my youth I had three loves: the temperance movement; the church, because I was also an active member of the Baptist Church in Easington; and the Labour Party."

 

Rutherford went on to set up neo-temperance organisations all over the world, including Eurocare and the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance (Jernigan is on the board of the latter) and he was chairman of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Alcohol Studies. 

In a video for the Institute of Alcohol Studies (the successor to the UK Temperance Alliance), Jernigan uses rhetoric straight from the anti-tobacco playbook.

    

"When you have a product that kills three million people a year worldwide, is carcinogenic and is associated with more than 200 disease and injury conditions, you need to do a lot of marketing."

 

Although delivered with a self-satisfied smile, this is nonsense to anybody who gives it more than two seconds thought. Alcohol has been widely consumed for thousands of years, long before the advent of marketing, and it continues to be widely consumed in countries that ban alcohol marketing today. 

Despite being a religiously inspired temperance advocate who doesn't understand the market he has spent his career writing about, Jernigan has been an advisor to the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO) and was the principal author of WHO’s first Global Status Report on Alcohol and Global Status Report on Alcohol and Youth.

And now he is using children "to share data and insights on alcohol policy with lawmakers". Many such cases.