> May 13, 2001
>
> THEN AND NOW
>
> Allow Us to Demonstrate: Student Protest Comes of Age
>
> By JODI WILGOREN
>
> SINCE they finished finals at the end of April, Ben
> Royal and three fellow
> University of Michigan students have been driving
> around the Northeast in a
> green 1992 Toyota Corolla, trying to make a
> movement.
>
> They went to Pennsylvania State University, where
> death threats to black
> students recently inspired a sleep- in at the
> student center. They stopped
> at Brown University, where protesters outraged by an
> advertisement
> concerning reparations for slavery confiscated
> copies of the student paper
> and formed human chains to block its distribution.
> And they made several
> visits to Harvard, where 26 smelly students emerged
> Wednesday after a
> three-week sit-in over how much the nation's richest
> university pays its
> janitors.
>
> Mr. Royal and his comrades, cell phones at their
> ears, are recruiting for a
> June conference on their Ann Arbor campus. They hope
> for attendance of 200
> ^ twice, they note, the number that gathered for the
> founding conference of
> the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in
> 1960.
>
> There is a fine line between a march and a movement,
> and with students, in
> the glare of springtime, that line can be hard to
> see ^ particularly in a
> culture that has become inured to the endless
> variations on chants that
> begin, "Hey hey, ho ho." There is, cynics will say,
> always a hardy band of
> leftists decrying something or other on every
> college campus, like
> background noise on the soundtrack of a liberal
> education. But if the
> activism of the late 1960's signified a more
> profound challenge to the
> fabric of society, today's demonstrations ^ focused,
> tolerated and
> relentlessly coordinated ^ may be more efficient at
> achieving their goals.
>
> Student protest has a long history in Europe and
> Asia, dating at least to
> the 19th century. American campuses were slower to
> simmer, with the first
> sparks coming over economic issues in the 1930's and
> 1940's. It was only as
> universities opened up to a more diverse student
> body, in the 1960's, that
> a true student movement took hold, focused first on
> civil rights and then
> on the Vietnam War. A second generation arose in the
> 1980's, when students
> erected mock shantytowns and pushed many
> universities to divest themselves
> of their holdings in apartheid-era South Africa.
>
> In both cases, the involvement of the young
> intellectual elite served to
> grab public attention. But the linkages between the
> student efforts and
> more established adult groups ^ businesses and
> antiwar veterans, Democratic
> politicians and civil rights leaders ^ were crucial
> to creating actual
> change.
>
> "Students very often are the most publicized
> element, and very often they
> engage in the most dramatic actions because they are
> young and free and
> more ready to take risks because they are young and
> free," said Howard
> Zinn, the radical historian who visited the Harvard
> encampment several
> times. "If that movement doesn't go beyond students,
> then it doesn't go
> very far."
>
> THE latest rumblings, dating back about five years,
> focus on economic
> justice and globalization, with a dash of
> environmentalism. Students have
> rallied against the use of sweatshop labor to make
> their sweatshirts; now,
> at Harvard and across the country, they are aligning
> with union organizers
> to call for a "living wage" for the universities'
> lowest-paid employees.
> Mr. Royal and his friends, meanwhile, are trying to
> defend affirmative
> action.
>
> Students were a major element of the recent civil
> disobedience disrupting
> world trade meetings in Seattle and Quebec, and
> unions have also stepped up
> their organizing among professors, graduate
> students, and even
> undergraduates across the country. In both the
> actions on campuses and the
> highly publicized protests of globalization that
> have targeted political
> and diplomatic conferences, students have forged an
> unusually strong
> alliance with labor.
>
> This new partnership comes in part from the
> increasing interest among union
> leaders in direct action, and labor has reached out
> to young people with
> programs like Union Summer, an echo of the 1964
> Freedom Summer, with
> college students organizing workers this time
> instead of registering
> voters. It also reflects the outward-looking
> ideology of today's students,
> who are rallying for the rights of low-wage workers
> even though, with their
> expensive degrees, they are unlikely to confront
> such problems personally.
>
> ELECTRONIC communication has also revolutionized the
> revolution. Organizers
> now coordinate activities through e-mail and Web
> sites; the Harvard
> protesters spent much of their time on cell phones,
> blitzing the media and
> urging celebrities to come to the daily noontime
> rallies outside the window
> (they also frequently called their parents and
> assured them they were all
> right).
>
> Whether the series of campus demonstrations in
> recent years will escalate
> into a sort of third wave of student movement, on
> the order of antiwar or
> divestment, remains a question. Harvard did not
> yield to the students'
> demands to pay all workers at least $10.25 an hour,
> instead just naming a
> new committee to reconsider the question. Still, the
> high-profile action at
> the nation's most prestigious university has already
> spurred copycats at
> the University of Connecticut, and could prove a
> bellwether.
>
> At the same time, where once student protests shook
> the nation to its core,
> they have now become common enough to feel like a
> springtime rite of
> passage, prompting yawns or dismissive contempt. In
> the 1960's, students
> were questioning the foundation of American society,
> protesting the very
> authority of the institutions that governed their
> lives. Today, the
> questions seem far narrower, the protests somehow
> safer.
>
> When Students for a Democratic Society occupied
> administration buildings in
> the 1960's, the abiding image was of long-haired
> hippies smoking cigars
> with their feet propped on the university
> president's desk. This year, many
> students brought books and laptops into
> Massachusetts Hall so they wouldn't
> fall too far behind in their schoolwork. In 1969,
> during a demonstration
> against R.O.T.C. recruiting at Harvard, the police
> stormed University Hall
> and threw the students out after 24 hours; officers
> brought today's
> protesters deodorant and dinner.
>
> And many student protests are about far less cosmic,
> more self- interested
> concerns, like the recent University of North
> Carolina march over budget
> cuts, or last weekend's demonstration at Boston
> University complaining that
> construction on a soccer field was a noisy
> disruption during exams.
>
> Donald Kagan, a classics professor at Yale
> University, said that
> administrators ^ many of whom came of age in the
> 60's, some through sit-ins
> ^ have gotten soft, and that by failing to
> discipline students for acts of
> civil disobedience, are "miseducating them morally."
>
> "In the real world, your acts have consequences,"
> Professor Kagan said. "At
> Yale and Harvard, they don't. If you don't risk
> anything, it costs you
> nothing. You're not a hero, you're a bully."
>
> THE cynics say that students protest in the spring
> because they prefer it
> to studying, that students protest because they have
> more time and less to
> lose, that rallies and demonstrations are like so
> many other extra-
> curricular activities.
>
> But if they don't do it, who will?
>
> "This is going to sound like what adults say when
> they're patronizing
> students, but when you're older, you're saddled with
> a lot of different
> responsibilities," said Ari Weisbard, a Harvard
> junior from Madison, Wis.,
> who was among the sitters through Day 21. "You can't
> really throw
> everything aside for several weeks to devote to
> something important. It's
> not just that we're more idealistic because we
> haven't had as much world
> experience. It's that we have a real chance to act
> on our ideals."
>
> Mr. Weisbard, whose father was among the protesters
> at Harvard in 1969,
> acknowledged that skipping two and a half weeks of
> classes was unlikely to
> hurt his law school applications. The only homework
> he managed to get done
> inside was reading two chapters of a text titled
> "Political Equality," but
> he was able to get an extension on his philosophy
> paper until next week.
>
> Then there's his social studies tutorial, a seminar
> called Community
> Organizing and Civic Democracy. He is hoping the
> professor will understand
> why he missed class, gathering primary research for
> his final paper.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 14 2001 - 20:59:59 EDT