Monday, January 13, 2003
Lack of campus activism a sign of a different time
Students are busy working to pay for college, and besides, there's no draft.
By JEFF ROWE
The Orange County Register
A folk singer today might ask: Where have all the student protesters gone?
The chorus line would be: All gone to work. Or online. And, no draft to bother me.
As the nation marches toward confrontations with both Iraq and North Korea, college campuses remain mostly as calm as industrial parks. Most of the thousands who protested war Saturday in Los Angeles were adults, some of them parents of college students. "For a country about to go to war, it's incredibly quiet on campus," said Ron Galleny, political science professor at California State University, Fullerton.
It was very different when the parents of today's students were enrolled; college campuses convulsed with protests over the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination and environmental issues.
"There really isn't much protest," said Kim Pierceall, editor in chief of the Daily Titan at Cal State Fullerton. "When we got the fliers for the (November) Iraq protest, it was a shock to me." She said about 30 students began the march against involvement in Iraq, although the crowd grew larger by the end of the event.
More might have attended, but they likely had to work.
Quietly, with little discussion and certainly no protest, work has become a dominant factor in many students' lives.
"I work two part-time jobs, which keeps me bouncing around," said Julie Porcher, a nursing student at Fullerton College. Dozens of other students gave similar responses when asked about activism.
At Cal State Fullerton, three-quarters of undergraduate students are working, and their average workweek is 25 hours, school figures show. While the percentage of working students is about the same as in 1994, the last time the university surveyed students on their jobs, the average workweek has risen. And the 1994 Student Needs and Priorities Survey concluded that "CSUF students' time is literally filled with work and school."
It is the same nationally.
Among full-time college students in the United States, 74 percent work, up from 71 percent in 1995-1996, according to the Washington-based State Public Interest Research Groups, SPIRG. But the question arises: Does the focus on work and a career come at the expense of engaging in social, political and moral debate? Apparently, it does.
Orange County college campuses are overrun with record enrollments, and students seem to worry most about availability of classes, finding a parking space and meshing class schedules and work.
The swiftly escalating price of a college education is pressing more students into more demanding work schedules and forcing them to put political activism on the back burner.
Students' loan debt has doubled in the past eight years to $17,000, figures compiled by SPIRG show.
But the growing workload is not the only reason student activism appears to have become almost a quaint practice from the same era in which students completed reports on manual typewriters.
More subtly, the Internet has become a forum for political voices that protesters in the 1960s and 1970s could only have dreamed about. Anyone angry about U.S. policies in Iraq can find thousands of kindred voices at sites such as Antiwar.com.
But what about college campuses as social labs for idealism, change and justice? Interest in politics, policy and issues also appears scant.
At University of California, Irvine, for example, the campus Democrat club claims 14 members, enough to be ahead of the Republicans, who count a dozen faithful. UCI's fall enrollment was 22,668, up from 16,244 in fall 1992.
Early in the just-completed fall semester, the first meeting of the Political Awareness Coalition at CSUF attracted four students. CSUF's fall enrollment was a record 32,143. Troy Pickard is a protester in the '60s mold. A senior in Peace Studies at Chapman University in Orange, Pickard writes anti-war editorials in the school paper, organizes protests and plans to travel to San Francisco later this month to join a peace demonstration for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. His theory on why campus protests are so few and so small: "Students have a tendency to be more introverted in how they look at the world." And the complexities of today's world demands the resources of lawyers, lobbyists and political specialists, an armada that smaller activist groups cannot muster.
"The absence of confrontation gives people the illusion that things are taken care of," says Bob Caustin, 48, founding director of Defend the Bay, which works to preserve Orange County coastal waters. Caustin laments the passing of the student activism era; sometimes he is the sole protester of Orange County developments, even on cases his group eventually has won in court.
Rather than assembling a multitude of sign-toting demonstrators, protest groups have learned a bit of professional public relations can deliver much more clout.
Celebrities can get airtime on the evening news. A slogan concocted by advertising copywriters can overshadow thoughtful reasoning.
But perhaps the biggest factor in the relative calm on campus is the lack of a military draft and a confidence that the U.S. military is invincible.
Also contributing to campus calm: More students attend part-time, the average age is higher, and women now are the majority on campus.
Meanwhile, the protest generation of the 1960s and 1970s has moved on to career advancement, grandchildren and perhaps less visible social action.
Most of them.
Retired history teacher Mike Mang has assembled a protest group near South Coast Plaza every Friday night since American forces attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan. One of the signs on a recent evening seemed the perfect update of 1960s thinking: "Peace is patriotism." |
