High minds and picket lines

A History of Campus Activism: past, present and future

MELISSA HIEBERT, STAFF

“Good evening my fellow Americans.

“Ten days ago in my report to the nation on Vietnam I announced the decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans from Vietnam over the next year. . .

“And at that time I warned that if I included that if increased enemy activity in any of these areas endangered the lives of Americans remaining in Vietnam, I would not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation.

“Despite that warning, North Vietnam has increased its military aggression in all these areas, and particularly in Cambodia. . .

“To protect our men who are in Vietnam, and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization program, I have concluded that the time has come for action. . . . ”

-Excerpts, Richard M. Nixon’s televised address of Thursday, April 30, 1970.

Four days later, four students lay dead and nine wounded in a parking lot at Kent State University after a barrage of 61 bullets was fired into a crowd of protestors by the Ohio National Guard over the course of thirteen seconds in one of the bloodiest and most well-known campus protests in American history.

KENT STATE: WHAT HAPPENED?

With the a not-so-distant memory of the Second World War lingering on the psyches of young Americans and battle cries of the “New Left” echoing around the globe, campus radicalism was ablaze during the ’60s and early ’70s. In Kent State alone, enrollment numbers spiked from 5,500 in 1950 to around 21,000 in 1970, demonstrating the exponential growth in university enrollment over the course of two short decades; a growth that gave way to the student movement fuelled by a growing number of young intellectuals high on the discovery of fresh ideologies still largely regarded as taboo by the greater society.

“On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon made a televised address to the nation and at that time announced that he was committing United States troops from Vietnam into specified areas of Cambodia,” states the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division’s summary of FBI reports following the May 4 shootings of student protestors who were contesting President Richard Nixon’s decision. “The reaction of some Kent State students and faculty was immediate.”

The report continues on to detail the events leading up to that fateful day that, in a sense, marked the beginning of the end of student radicalism.

On May 1, 1970, around 500 students and faculty members gathered around the Victory Bell to protest Nixon’s dismissal of the constitution, even burning a symbolic document.

The May 1 demonstrators eventually disbanded without incident, but the participants agreed to hold another protest a few days later, around noon on the following Monday, May 4.

However, later that evening, protests commenced in downtown Kent, started by a small group of people shouting anti-war chants (some students, some not). The crowd began to throw beer bottles and rocks at passing by cop cars, and then set a huge bonfire in the middle of the street. As the crowd grew larger to around 400-500, windows of nearby establishments were smashed, and stores were looted.

The following day, the mayor of Kent declared a state of civil emergency, imposing a curfew on the city and enlisting in the help of the National Guard in order to “assist in restoring law and order in the City of Kent . . . and Kent State University.” Later that evening, an even larger, more destructive protest broke out on campus, which ended with students burning down the Reserve Officer Training Corps building on campus (ROTC building) after a battling duel between students armed with rocks and police armed with tear gas.

On the evening of May 3 another group of protestors, this time numbering in the thousands, assembled again, this time with a list of demands. After student demands to speak with officials were not met, a flurry of rocks, tear gas and bayonets ensued, resulting in the arrests of 51 students.

The following day, May 4, 1970, at around 11:30 a.m., students began to gather in front of the Victory Bell. This time, approximately 850 national guardsmen were located on campus at Kent State University. The crowd of 1,200 was ordered several times to disperse, but the orders were simply met with chants of, “One, two, three four, we don’t want your fucking war,” and, “Power to the people, fuck the pigs.”

After that point, descriptions of what happened are hazy and conflicting. More rocks were thrown and were met with canister upon canister of tear gas. Students began to fragment. Around this time, the guards were told to advance towards the hall, and the students, who thought that the guards had run out of tear gas, began to follow after them, until the guards suddenly whipped around and began firing rounds into the advancing crowd. After the firing had stopped, four students lay dead on the ground surrounded by stunned and horrified classmates.

In the few days prior to the Kent State tragedy, there were around 20 different campus protests taking place each day around the country. After May 4, there were around 100. By May 10, a reported 448 schools were either closed down or affected by some kind of strike. And, a mere 10 days after the Kent State shootings, another two students were shot dead and 12 lay wounded after a protest at Jackson State University.

By the end of May, the Urban Research Corporation reported that in the previous month alone, around one third of about 2,500 colleges and universities in the United States had experienced some kind of protest activity, branding it as one of the most politically charged and active periods in campus history.

THE RISE OF CAMPUS RADICALISM

Though campus radicalism may have surged in the early ’60s compared to the previous decades, student activism was by no means a new phenomenon. Though incidents of mass conflicts between young rebellious students and authority figures date as far back as the St. Scholastica Day riots at Oxford in 1354 (an escalated dispute which left dozens of scholars and townspeople dead), it was not until the ’30s when mass student movements became linked to national politics. With the economic situation at home rapidly deteriorating and the global situation worsening, students began to protest against the imminent world war, picketing and collectively denouncing the war. A poll of university students in the 1930s found that around 25 per cent of students were sympathetic to socialism, and almost 40 per cent would refuse to take part in war.

Following the war, however, campus activism was on the decline. In 1957, one writer even predicted that “the day of student action, of petitions, eager discussions and picket lines is long gone.” Though campus activism was rife in other areas of the world, such as backlashes against powerful dictators in Latin America and protests in Japan against the security treaty with the U.S., the students that characterized the ’50s in America were largely complacent and silent.

As soon as 1960 hit, however, campus activism began to once again rise. “As the tensions of the cold war lessened,” states a passage from The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, “students felt less obliged to defend Western democracy and more free to take a critical look at their own society.”

The civil rights movement largely fuelled the rebirth of campus unrest in the ’60s, beginning with the arrest of four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College after sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in February of 1960. Almost immediately, students around the country began to follow their lead, staging sit-ins and protests, and engaging in other forms of non-violent direct action.

As the decade progressed, the activism that was largely geared towards civil rights began to branch out in focus to other causes, including a well-known incident at Berkeley University involving a dispute over the enforcement of an old law that prohibited activist groups from soliciting members on campus. The dispute escalated, and eventually the leaders of a group called the Free Speech Movement (FSM) staged a two-day sit-in in front of the administration building to protest their right to organize and hold demonstrations on campus, resulting in hundreds of arrests that lead to overwhelming support from both faculty members and students who were not previously involved.

In the following years, campus activism grew to become the norm. In 1965, one in three campuses reported civil rights protests, and one in five reported on-campus protests deploring the Vietnam War. These two issues initially were the main causes of campus unrest throughout the mid part of the ’60s, but as the decade bore on, a third discontent was overwhelmingly added into the mix; the largely unresponsiveness of the federal government to student demands and their decidedly oppressive reaction to campus activism.

Though the first two oppositions may have led to important instances of social and political change, it was the latter of the three goals that set the stage for campus activism in the present day.

ACTIVISM TODAY

Campus activism in the ’60s and ’70s was staunchly opposed, and alternative ideologies remained largely underground. However, in 2007, campus dynamics could not be more opposite. Today, students can’t set foot in a political science class without being force-fed Marx, and would be shunned completely if they hadn’t read Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” or some other left-wing bible by the end of first year. The once “radical” ideas of the ’60s have become commonplace, and almost expected as a right of passage into university life.

Last year, the University of Manitoba even offered a course entitled “Shaking the Tree: Activism and the Environment,” sardonically dubbed “Activism 101.” The course was dedicated to teaching students (and members of the community) about a wide variety of subjects in the areas of environmental issues, social justice, and consumer culture, followed by thoughtful discussion. Also, in lieu of an exam, the final project involved planning some form of action together as a class.

The class, in the beginning, was a huge success. The turnout each week was high, and students were almost tripping over each other to sign up to teach lectures in the participatory, student-led class. A small working group was formed outside of class time in order to have more time to plan the year-end action, which originally started out as a highly ambitious venture involving the formation of several subcommittees in charge of everything from equipment bookings to media relations.

However, as the year progressed, the once burgeoning and “revolutionary” class began to slowly lose momentum. Class turnout started to dwindle, and presentations became less inspired. Long debates over ideology and course mechanics began to take centre stage. Disagreements ensued over the focus of the final project, with each student championing their own individual cause. Eventually, students began to start caring more about marks and GPAs, and often the class ended up taking a backburner to more demanding classes. In the end, the class action was abandoned altogether, and most students ended up individually plugging into other already-existing actions or completing other projects for marks.

The class, though serving as a victorious symbol of ideological freedom that students in the ’60s fought so hard to obtain, perfectly mirrors the state of activism in the present day, which has become increasingly characterized by segregation, burnout, and eventually, apathy.

One need only look around to notice the absence of activism on campuses today. Whereas the illegal and unjust war in Vietnam in the ’60s was fervently opposed by a nation of passionate students, today’s equally illegal war in Iraq may be met with just as much disapproval, but comparably little opposition. A poll taken by the Pew Research Center in 2005 showed that Bush’s approval rating among college students in the United States was as low as 36 per cent, but one would be hard pressed to find empirical evidence of this statistic other than the occasional anti-Bush grumbling or perhaps a half-hearted, off-campus protest on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq some other dutiful occasion.

Also, the focus of campus-based activism has shifted focus from larger social issues to narrow issues promoted by the students’ unions. Last year’s CFS-led tuition freeze protest in Winnipeg, which lured more students in with promises of free hot dogs than real excitement over lower tuition fees, is about the closest thing left to a genuine campus-led protest that one will find these days.

It is no secret that our nation’s campuses, which were once hotbeds of political action, have regressed into largely silent and lethargic places full of students who may often grumble but rarely act.

Whereas the ’60s brought large distinctive causes that unified a nation of students, the increasing number of small, narrow causes that characterize our world today works to divide students, all of whom have different priorities. Though more knowledge and insight about varying problems may lead to a wider range of dialogue and a broader base of change, it also can leave students overwhelmed and fragmented by the huge number of problems facing our world today. Also, a continual fragmentation of causes may lead to an increased number of protests, but also a decrease in attendance. And the media, along with the general populace, can only witness so many sparsely populated protests before they become desensitized and unresponsive.

THE NEW FACE OF ACTIVISM

However, though modern-day protests may seem few and far between by ’60s standards, one doesn’t have to look far to notice the overwhelming amount of progress that has been made on social and environmental fronts, behind the scenes. Huge progress has been made in the last several decades, with many universities often becoming the front-runners in environmental sustainability and social responsibility. In addition to the numerous on-campus services dedicated to ensure the comfort and rights of all students on campus (such as the Womyn’s Centre, Disability Services, and International Student Centre), every campus is bound to have no shortage of human rights groups such as Amnesty International, or community development groups like Engineers Without Borders.

As Aristotle once said in regards to the youth in society, “they are high-minded, for they have not yet been humbled by life nor have they experienced the force of necessity; further, there is a high-mindedness in thinking oneself worthy of great things . . . In their actions, they prefer the noble to the useful; their life is guided by character rather than by calculation, for the latter aims at the useful, virtue at the noble . . .” Perhaps in today’s society, what comes across as apathy is merely a more calculated, useful cry for social change rather than romantic fantasies based around nobility rather that practicality.

Alternative ideologies and instances of direct action may no longer be as radical and as prevalent as they were in the ’60s, but perhaps the days of the wild, loud, and romanticized protests have given birth to a new breed of campus-based action; action that may not be as fervent and as loud, but perhaps more thoughtful and measured, with longer-lasting and more effective results.