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Social activism dead on college campuses?

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

August 28, 2008

At Columbia University, where students in 1968 took the acting dean of the college hostage, a new class of freshmen will arrive this week and hear about ways to get extra scholarship funding to pay for college.

At New York University, where undergrads in the 1970s held a supercomputer hostage for three weeks, new students will hear about joining community service projects. And at campuses around the country, experts say students who once thrilled at the freedom that college represented will shrug and use their unlimited cell phone minutes to call home.

With wars once again raging overseas and a wildly unpopular president sitting in the Oval Office, what happened to the spirit of '68?

To be sure, the lack of a draft and the absence of broader social upheavals figure in today's quieter campuses. But many historians, students, and activists from then and now suggest it comes down to one word: money.

"People spend a lot of money here to go here," said Samantha Stanton, a gay and Latina activist at Columbia. "They try not to go out and get arrested."

It is a sentiment echoed by activists on college campuses throughout the five boroughs, who say they understand why their fellow undergrads don't join them at the barricades.

The debt they are taking on is too great, positions in the job market or graduate school too scarce, and the sacrifice too considerable to risk it all for a political gesture that may have very little real world impact anyway.

"That's the biggest factor in why students aren't at the forefront of the anti-war movement," said David Judd, a member of the International Socialist Organization at Columbia until he graduated last spring. "People feel like they need to put their time and energy into schoolwork or they fear they won't get that job they want when they graduate."

Stanton, who will be a senior and grew up on Long Island, said she came to Columbia because she thought it would be a radical and progressive campus.

"I thought it would be a good place to connect with people who are like-minded," she said. "But I think Columbia attracts a lot of people who go there for the Ivy League status and the name. As an institution I think Columbia is just kind of a big corporation."

What's more, the lack of political engagement among U.S. campuses is mirrored by a lack of strong social movements, according to Todd Gitlin, a professor at Columbia and former president of the Students for a Democratic Society, part of the 1960s protest movement.

"The students of '68 were standing on the shoulders of the civil rights marchers and others who had been organizing for years," he said. "Students today don't have that kind of example or that kind of context."

College, too, has ceased to be the kind of liberating moment it was a generation ago, said Helen Horowitz, author of Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present.

"What used to happen in college happens now in high school," she said. "Theater culture, Goth culture, drug culture, sexual experimentation happen much earlier."

She added that the prospect of a wartime draft in earlier eras had the effect of concentrating the mind on external factors.

"You do have an unpopular war, but you don't have a draft, and you don't have the kind of breaking up of other structures in society," she said. "The strikes of the '70s are impossible to imagine today."

Many students today say their focus is on tangible campus issues-- fighting university expansion plans, for example, or advocating for a living wage for dining and janitorial staff.

"On the war, for reasons that stretch from here to next week people feel a total sense of disempowerment," said Duncan Meisel, who will be a senior at New York University. He is a student leader at Take Back NYU, which has advocated for greater disclosure about the university's expansion plans in Abu Dhabi and wants a student placed on the Board of Trustees.

"We pay somewhere around $50,000 annually but we have no rights to determine how our tuition dollars are used. NYU is a powerful institution and is in a position to do a lot of good. This is something we can win," he said.

Some, though, see college campuses as poised to undergo a resurgence of political engagement after years of lying dormant.