http://old.post-gazette.com/localnews/20021124protest1124p4.asp
Specter of war treads lightly on campuses
Student bodies haven't been fully engaged by direct appeals to oppose Iraq attack
Sunday, November 24, 2002
By Bill Schackner, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Student activists who say their government is about to make an epic mistake gather every Friday around a table on the University of Pittsburgh campus and unfurl a sign with a simple message.
"Disagree with a war in Iraq?" asks the poster in the William Pitt Union. "Do something."
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| Pitt senior Lindsay Liprando signs a letter to Presidnet Bush, urging him to reconsider war with Iraq. Andrew Schrock and Caset Currin are part of Students in Solidarity, which sponsored the table. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette) |
Passers-by often do.
One recent afternoon, members of the anti-war committee of Students in Solidarity mustered 78 signatures, enough to build a pile of form letters urging the White House to reconsider its stand. One signer, sophomore Laura Wright, was adamant that the United States has no business attacking another country first.
"This will set an ugly precedent that a country has no right to sovereignty," said Wright, 20, of New Stanton. "Most people [who] I know are opposed to it."
On the surface, those words and signatures have a strong ring of solidarity, the kind that in the 1960s turned the nation's campuses into breeding grounds of dissent.
But elsewhere at Pitt, and on campuses nationwide, there are reminders that this is a different era, and that winning over minds this time won't be a walk through Woodstock.
Not far from the anti-war table, another group of undergraduates stands outdoors next to a bronze statue of Pitt's mascot Panther and agrees there is little buzz about the topic.
"I don't think there's a lot of support for the anti-war movement right now, especially after all the stuff that happened with Sept. 11," said Pitt freshman David Schaffner, who says war with Iraq is necessary. "The country is pretty solidly behind its leaders right now, just because it makes people feel safer."
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| Alisha Bhagat, 19, a student at Carnegie Mellon University, hands out leaflets in the Strip District yesterday protesting a possible war on Iraq. An anti-war rally was held at 21st and Smallman streets. (Tony Tye, Post-Gazette) | |
Schaffner's view, and the sharply different opinion held by Wright, pose a question for organizers as they gauge the movement's reach. If bombs start dropping, and U.S. servicemen die, will a topic now debated in dormitories and in classrooms become a full-blown, unified protest movement reminiscent of Vietnam?
Or will it be the same core group of student activists, presiding over sparsely attended rallies?
What's missing from the movement, some say, are the elements that ignited campuses in the late 1960s: A prolonged and televised bloody conflict in which a student's prospect of dying was as real as the draft.
For now, many area protests are noteworthy less for their size than their flair.
Instead of sit-ins or raucous street demonstrations, students on some campuses are employing a mix of artwork, impromptu guerrilla theater and other creative means to drive home their points.
At Carnegie Mellon University, activists unveiled an Axis of Evil game at an outdoor carnival. Participants in a parking lot tossed water balloons at people wearing T-shirts denoting civilian and military targets in countries such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Whenever they hit a target, they were quizzed about some aspect of the country's society.
The message was "you're attacking people," campus organizer Syed Saleh Waziruddin said. "These are not just abstract points. They are societies that we should value."
Takkeem Morgan, vice president of Penn State Black Caucus, created a temporary outdoor sculpture on campus of five dead Iraqi children. The models were wrapped head to toe in trash bags. Information about them was posted nearby.
Students walking through Penn State's Hetzel Union Building recently came upon an exhibit showing the meager food supplies available to an Iraqi citizen.
Nationwide, there is little doubt that the hawkish tone from Washington has energized a core of students, including veteran protesters and newcomers. They are planning education campaigns, leafleting on and off campus, and making noise at rallies and marches.
The Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, estimates that 300 anti-war demonstrations have been held across the country. They range from 20 or so students at New York University who staged sit-ins to many thousands who marched in San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; and other cities.
E-mails arrive regularly from students intent on starting campus groups or professors interested in holding teach-ins, said Juliette Niehuss, student coordinator for the institute.
"We're doing this months before we even go to war," she said. "We haven't seen the bodies come back."
For now, though, the sharpest salvos by activists are being fired not on the streets, but on paper, and not all of the speeches are anti-war.
On some campuses, such posters as "No Blood for Oil" and "Drop Bush Not Bombs" are being matched by signs such as the one posted in NYU's student activities center to promote meetings of the College Republicans.
"Save the children," it reads. "Bomb Iraq."
In spots, the street theater seems straight from the days of Joan Baez, with its drum-playing protesters, students with dreadlocks and calls for civil disobedience. But those running the events carry pagers, and they're getting word out with help from e-mail and Web sites.
On area campuses, from Gannon University to Point Park College, dissent can be found, too -- but only to a point.
At Penn State, a handful of the campus's 41,000 students join monthly protests at the university's gates, and several hundred boarded buses for the Oct. 26 rally in Washington, D.C. -- numbers far short of the 4,000 students who showed up in April 2001 for a rally after several black students received death threats.
At Carnegie Mellon, 15 marchers on the 8,600-student campus set out for a rally Sept. 21 at Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland and were joined by 15 others along the way. About 60 from campus traveled by bus to the Washington, D.C., rally.
Those numbers smack of apathy to graying hippies who saw campuses shut down by Vietnam protests. That may be true, observers say, but it's more complicated than that.
The '60s movement was years in the making, they say, and was fueled in large part by tens of thousands of U.S. casualties in Vietnam and fears of the military draft. The draft ended in 1973, and there is little tangible evidence that an Iraqi war now would affect students' lives any more than the Persian Gulf war did a decade ago.
"The war hasn't started. We have a volunteer Army. It's not quite real yet," said Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University and an author who researches student attitudes. "There is no indication that it is resonating with a wider audience."
Levine said the biggest protests as a percentage of campus population took place in the 1930s, when horrific memories of the carnage of World War I moved a generation of students to speak out against involvement in what became World War II.
"What this generation has seen was a war with Iraq in which the number of people who died was actually quite small, and we watched it on TV," he said.
Tom Hayden, former California state senator and a leader of the '60s campus movement, said he believed that anti-war organizers actually were further along today than their predecessors were in early 1965, before America's Vietnam involvement escalated. What will happen this time, he said, "depends on what kind of war we have."
In the '60s, as Vietnam divided the country, protest leaders who had honed their skills in the civil rights movement in the South overcame apathy among their campus peers. He draws parallels to today.
"You have a very well-educated minority of students who are organizing protests. They already have experience with the anti-globalization movement, with Seattle and with [World Trade Organization] protests," Hayden said.
They have something their '60s counterparts lacked, said Hayden, one of the Chicago Seven defendants accused but later cleared of charges related to street violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "We didn't have the right to vote," he said.
Eighteen-year-olds got the right to cast ballots in the 1972 presidential election, as the voting age was lowered from 21.
Of course, voting is a tool many college students in Pittsburgh and elsewhere do not use.
It's far from certain if a war with Iraq will change that. At Pitt, interviews with student groups ranging from the Black Action Society to the College Republicans suggest that the campus, by and large, has not been moved enough to mobilize.
Andrew Schrock, 21, acknowledged the same the other day as he sat at the anti-war table in the William Pitt Union with literature promoting peace.
"There is a level of awareness," he said. "I don't think it's all that high. I think it should be higher."
But, he said, there is time to overcome that.
"My goal is not to change policies right now," he said. "I'm more interested in changing people's minds, making them interested."
Some organizers got involved on their campuses through courses they are taking on topics such as peace movements. Others had been active in causes for years -- from the Cuban embargo to the environment -- or signed on after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks over what they saw as government infringements on civil liberties.
Hayden said the media wasn't picking up on the ground swell over Iraq. He said news outlets contrived unfair comparisons between this early-stage organizing and late-stage Vietnam demonstrations.
At Point Park, student organizer Chad Skaggs would seem to agree. He spouts statistics about corporate ownership of newspapers the way others rattle off baseball statistics, asserting that the media shy away from certain causes. He didn't hesitate when asked what would be needed for the anti-war movement to take hold on college campuses.
"A free and open press," he said.
But Schaffner, the Pitt student, offered a different suggestion, one he said was now commonly used to lure students to all kinds of events.
"You want a big turnout?" he asked. "You give people free food. It doesn't matter what kind."
