COLLEGE CRUSADERS; TIMES AND ISSUES CHANGE, BUT STUDENTS REMAIN COMMITTED TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE
By Nancy Amdur. Special to the Chicago Tribune.
Students today have been labeled Generation X, Generation Y, apathetic and slackers, but they are not lying low. Students nationwide are banding together around a range of issues, such as sweatshops, college tuition hikes, corporate influence on public education, campus democracy and affirmative action.
"Hundreds of students are organizing every month," said Stephen Parks, an assistant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia and director of Teachers for a Democratic Culture, which works to counter negative portrayals of topics such as feminism, multiculturalism and cultural, race and gay studies in college courses.
"My sense of doing activism for three years in college and one year out of college is (that) things have grown a good deal, especially in the past couple years," said Eric Brakken, 22, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August 1999.
Protests around the recent World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle attracted thousands of students from across the country and are just one example of students' determination to be heard, activists said.
Students are fragmented across a variety of issues today; in the late 1960s, often considered the heyday of student activism, people coalesced against the Vietnam War and for civil rights.
"There are so many issues, it's hard to pin down what students care about," said Ben Manski, 25, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in August and devoted much of his time in college to left-wing activism.
Students do form coalitions around issues such as the anti-sweatshop movement, which brushes across a wide range of topics, including labor, human and women's rights and environmental concerns. The sweatshop campaign also is joining students and labor unions, Brakken said.
"It touches on a lot of different issues, and people are recognizing those are our counterparts in other parts of the world," said Brakken, who works full time at the United Students Against Sweatshops headquarters in Washington.
"The folks who are making our clothing a lot of times are the same age as us, 18, 19, 20 years old, and they don't get to go to school. Consciousness has grown that multinational corporations are where a lot of power is in this world, and we need to do something to change that."
Hundreds of students participated in sit-ins in March 1999 at schools around the country, and many were successful in getting administrators to create a code of conduct demanding that companies that manufacture university apparel release the names and locations of the factories they use.
Amanda Klonsky, a senior at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the anti-sweatshop sit-in last year was a turning point for the campus student movement. About 60 students camped out in the administration building for four days before administrators agreed to their demands regarding apparel companies.
"People who had never really stood up for something they believed in before realized they could do something for social change. It was a life-changing experience for all of us. Morale was built on campus and everybody felt like they had won something," said Klonsky, who has been active on campus since co-founding the Civil Rights Defense Coalition during her freshman year. The coalition supports the recruitment and retention of people of color.
In recent weeks more sit-ins were held in Madison and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor over the issue of sweatshops making college apparel. In both cases university officials conditionally agreed to join the Workers Rights Consortium, a factory manufacturing group that includes workers and human-rights organizations. The consortium was developed by students.
Klonsky's father, Mike Klonsky, also spent his college years in the late '60s and early '70s as an activist at what is now California State University, Northridge. Mike Klonsky, who teaches education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He remains active as co-director of the Small Schools Workshop based at UIC. The workshop, which he co-founded, explores issues of educational reform with a focus on the role that small schools can have in furthering positive whole-school and systemic change.
"Each generation of young people has an interest in shaping the future that they're growing up in," Mike Klonsky said. "Students are interested in leading an ethical and moral life."
"Students come (to school) with a lot of concerns about the society that they're inheriting and a strong sense of wanting to prepare themselves to participate in society and live a moral life," said William Ayers, an education professor at UIC and co-founder of the Small Schools Workshop. Ayers speaks throughout the country about education reform.
The turnover rate of students who typically leave campus after four years makes it challenging to maintain momentum among student activists, students said. The number of active students is unknown, said Bill Capowski, director of the Center for Campus Organizing, a Boston-based national non-profit group that supports progressive campus organizing. He added that even in the '60s it was a "small minority of students acting."
Some campuses are not active.
"Chicago is not a big campus activist town," said John Wilson, a graduate student at the University of Chicago who has been active on campus. "The big universities like Northwestern and University of Chicago are private, elite institutions, and UIC is a commuter campus, so it's harder to get students organized on a campus where there is not a student population."
"The University of Chicago is difficult because it has been a fairly apathetic campus," said Peter Frase, 19, a sophomore at U. of C. "The workload is so heavy here. It seems a small number of people are doing everything."
Frase is a member of the Youth Democratic Socialists. The group is the youth section of Democratic Socialists of America. Frase also is part of the 180 Movement for Democracy and Education, which focuses on combined campaigns with a focus on campus democracy.
Students benefit from new technology such as the Internet, cellular phones and fax machines, which make it easier for them to communicate.
Conservative groups may be particularly helped by the Internet, said Martin Green, co-founder and president of the year-old Duke Conservative Union at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
"The Internet is going to foster and encourage individualism," he said.
Right-wing activists tend to be less vocal then left-wing students, Green said. "It's not such a cohesive effort like the left wing, which is invigorated by unions."
Green said conservative activism is growing as students rally against affirmative action and underlying post-modernism in courses.
Rick Sollman, a senior at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., said conservative students focus more on graduating than creating social change.
"Most students who lean conservative are in college to get a degree and to get out into the real world and make money and are not dealing in politics," said Sollman, 21, chairman of the Penn State Young Americans for Freedom. The conservative group focuses on principles of individual freedom, free enterprise and personal responsibility.
Sit-ins, teach-ins, rallies, marches and forums are common tactics used by student activists. At most campuses, there are just a handful of students doing day-to-day organizing while a larger number of students attend events, students said.
The World Trade Organization protests invigorated some students.
"Seattle made a big difference," said Elizabeth Brandt, 20, a sophomore at the University of Chicago who is a member of the Young Democratic Socialists. "A lot of students never thought it was viable that student groups could do anything, and the protest in Seattle showed students could be heard all over the world."
"The Seattle WTO protest was a concrete victory," said Frase, who attended the event. "It brought criticisms of the WTO and free trade to such a wide audience and got people talking about it."
Groups working together produce the most change, Amanda Klonsky said. "What inhibits our effectiveness is not that we are thinking about a multiplicity of issues, but the times when we focus on our work and overlook issues that are central to all of us who are working for social change," she said.
Gerald Graff, associate dean for curriculum instruction in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIC, said students nationwide have been consistently active. Graff co-founded Teachers for a Democratic Culture in 1991.
"The official story was that student activism was dead after the '60s, but it never fully died down," he said. "During the '80s there were protests about multicultural issues, race and gender issues, and the emergence of culture was what led to formation of (Teachers for a Democratic Culture). And there are economic issues in the '90s, such as university downsizing."
Graff's wife, Cathy Birkenstein-Graff, is a graduate student at Loyola University Chicago, where she and other graduate students are considering forming a union as they rally against cuts in the graduate school budget.
Students are empowered by activism. Hilda Lopez, 24, a junior at San Diego State University, is part of a local chapter of the national student group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan. A main focus of the group is to promote higher education. At San Diego State, the group is protesting a state proposition calling for youths to be tried as adults for non-violent crimes.
"You can make a difference in people's lives if they see someone from their own background going to school, and (that) will make them motivated to go. They won't feel the doors are closed to them," Lopez said.
Activists 30 years ago arrived on campus with built-in issues of the Southern civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests, Ayers said.
"We didn't invent the movement. We stepped onto college campuses and there was a movement," said Ayers, who was the local president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1968 while a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Activism will always be a part of college life all over the world, Ayers said, because educational institutions are where "people come together and fight toward social justice and what we believe.":
