by Pete Martin:
On a cold Saturday in late January, Americans from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest the Iraq War. Of the tens of thousands rallying in the capital that day, the only Yale undergraduates were a pair of freshman roommates.
“I was expecting a lot of Yalies, but instead I found of lot of old hippie types,” said Claire Gordon, SY ’10, one of the two Yale students who attended the protest. “So many of the people protesting seemed to have the spirit of the ’60s. It was as if we were ‘outyouthed’ by our parents.” While millions of adults have mobilized to protest the current war in Iraq, many students do not share the same enthusiasm for activism as their parents’ generation. Whether a result of apathy or of cynicism, the level of student activism today is markedly lower than it was during Vietnam. Student activism also differs in degree. Less than a month after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, students at Columbia overran and occupied five university buildings, protesting the university’s racist policies and its role in the Vietnam War.
Students held the buildings for a week, until the NYPD forced them to leave. The demonstration was among the most visible and confrontational student uprisings of the time, but countless campuses saw students protest the war, as well as many domestic issues. Protestors frequently aimed to disrupt scheduled activity to gain the attention of their schools, the media, and the government.
Today such radical student activism is rare. Although young American soldiers are dying daily in Iraq, student protests against the Iraq War and other issues have usually avoided confrontation, working within restrictions established by schools or law. Rallies often occur over several hours on a single weekend day, as demonstrators gather in the morning and disperse by the evening, having made their point in numbers, chants, and signs. Bolder demonstrations may feature walkouts, in which students refuse to attend class or literally walk out of classes in progress, a common tactic of Vietnam-era protests. But few, if any, student protests today aim to halt all activity on campus. The rebellious nature of student protest during the Vietnam War era seems to have disappeared.
College students across the country acknowledge that their generation is different from the generation of students that went through college during the Vietnam War. “College students are a lot less entrepreneurial today and a lot more career-oriented and mercenary,” Dylan Suher, a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, told The Yale Globalist. “There’s a lot less idealism and a lot less political engagement.” Jesse Spielman, a junior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, agreed, confirming that, “The major political feeling is apathy.”
But outweighing any changes in the character of American youth are the changes that have taken place in American society since the 1960s and 1970s. During the years of the Vietnam War, there were countless political and social issues facing the country. Deeply entrenched racism and sexism in American society led to the birth of the civil rights movement and women’s rights movement only a few years before the start of the war. At the same time, the increasing prominence of drugs and the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s paved the way for a growing counterculture, as many turned to drugs and sex. The music and art of the period roundly embraced cultural and political issues, helping engage the nation’s youth and spurring activism. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” is a cliché today, but each of those individual items was a powerful social element from the late 1950s through the 1970s. On top of this was the most divisive political issue of the day: the war for which a universal draft was instated, a war that killed over 55,000 young American men in only ten years.
Decades later, such social unrest is hard to imagine. And many people, including students who spoke to the Globalist, have questioned the political interest, humanitarian empathy, and organizing energy of today’s students. “Students today either can’t or don’t want to organize in the ways, and on the scale, that students have in the past,” said Avery Halfon, a freshman at Stanford who attended a rally in Washington last year to protest the genocide in Darfur but has not found a large activist environment on campus.
This perception is likely fueled by infrequent student antiwar protests, but it overlooks significant youth activism on other causes. For example, two years ago a group of sophomores at Georgetown founded a student group to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur. Called Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), the group began by educating Georgetown students about the tragedies of the genocide. The group quickly inspired similar groups at other schools, and within a year, chapters had opened across the country. Now STAND is a national student organization with over 700 chapters at both colleges and high schools. STAND chapters have organized rallies on college campuses throughout the country and on the streets of Washington and New York, as well as divestment campaigns targeting schools and corporations.
Also in the last few years, college students have acted to support local causes. For example, students have banded with university workers to lobby their schools to pay all employees a living wage. The movement began in 2002, when Harvard students staged a 21-day sit-in that won a “parity wage” for all Harvard employees. Since then, students have organized protests for living wages at Brown, Stanford, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Yale, among other schools. At Yale, 400 students were among 800 arrested in September 2002 for blocking streets to demand a living wage for Yale employees.
Though they often shy away from the radicalism of the Vietnam era, students remain active proponents of important social causes; it is just that their involvement fluctuates. “From time to time there have been outbreaks of organizing energy on college campuses, even during periods of relative inactivity,” said Mark Rudd, who served as president of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which took control of five Columbia buildings in 1968. “For example, in the ’80s there was a huge divestment campaign on many campuses, including Columbia. It was part of the larger anti-apartheid, South African liberation movement. And it won! In the nineties there was a large and similarly successful anti-sweatshop movement on campuses. Most generalizations about student quiet tend to forget these outbreaks.” Rather than rising up only when wars become exceedingly bloody, students have repeatedly organized to advertise and protest injustice in many forms.
Yet students remain largely silent on the Iraq War. Though many have protested since before the invasion in March 2003, student activity has been miniscule compared to adult organizing. This inactivity stands in sharp contrast to the activism surrounding Darfur, a cause for which students have organized as extensively as adults.
The natures and scales of the wars can help explain the different levels of student anti-war activism during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Battle has raged in Iraq for four years, and the 3,100 American deaths as of February 2007 are only half the number of Americans killed in Vietnam in 1966 alone.
Additionally, not a single American has been drafted since 1973, a difference which may affect national opinion more than anything else.
“The presence of the draft touched almost every family in the country,” said Ed Felton of the ANSWER Coalition, a group that has organized dozens of anti-war rallies since 2003. “For anyone of draft age or any parents with children of draft age, the war lasted long enough to raise fears that it would continue until they or their children were drafted.” Without that immediate connection to their lives, Felton told the Globalist, “It’s not people’s instinct to wake up one morning and realize they need to be part of a militant social movement.”
While many students are activists, their causes are varied. And the global connection students feel—evidenced by the support for peace in Darfur—makes the low level of anti-war activism surprising, especially given the history of student activism during the Vietnam War.
But history may make this comparison more glaring, if American forces remain in Iraq and the death toll continues to rise. The student response cannot go unnoticed.