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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 25, 1985)
Student protests are once again in the news, but how significant are they? Will marching feet be heading for the picket lines this fall, or just back to class? iSS icAfnui — —— i l I W rm m-: K m m ' . Protesting Berkeley students’ administration building sleep-in. By Marc Cooper i come to believe what everyone else said about students being apathetic. We were wrong.” His news editor, Diana Elliot, has a similar perspective. ‘‘I don’t know why, but this is the first year there have been really large protests. Stu dents I know are now more aware of politics and issues than just a year or two before,” she says. While the large campuses on the East and West Coasts, like Columbia, Harvard, Rutgers, Cornell, Berkeley and UCLA have captured much of the news coverage of the resurgent stu dent movement, the activism has spread nationwide. Protests, rallies and sit-ins were held this year in areas like Wyoming and Nebraska, on campuses where protest groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) could hardly organize a chapter in the late Sixties, let alone stage a demonstra tion. In more conservative areas of the country, student activism, while growing in presence, is still viewed with skepticism. “Liberals are still seen by many as far-out, weird, bearded oafs,” says Ellen Williams of the University of Texas Daily Texan. Nevertheless, rallies at the Austin campus organized by the Black Stu dent Alliance attracted over 500 peo ple last spring. In March, 2,000 Uni versity of Texas students paraded to the state capitol to protest increased tuition fees. The Austin campus was not the only Southern school to experience protests. The Universities of Florida, Missouri, Louisville, North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke were among < Apartheid was the major issue in campus protests. University of Colorado students ^ protest CIA presence on campus. the other campuses that got involved this year in anti-apartheid demon strations. Karey Murakami, who has report ed on student protests for The Michi gan Daily at Ann Arbor, speculates that students have been moved to ac tion over a long list of grievances. “Most students got pretty tired of hearing how conservative they had become. This created a backlash,” said Murakami, adding, “World events have been quite a catalyst to action. The police violence in South Africa, the CIA mining the Nicara guan harbors ... these things didn’t go unnoticed by students.” At UCLA, where hundreds of stu dents camped out on campus for weeks in a makeshift ‘Mandela City’ (named for South African political prisoner Nelson Mandela), Sociolo gy Professor Maurice Zeitlin sug gests that today’s protests are taking place because the South Africa issue was tailor-made for sparking the new rebellion. “This issue invites an ab solute moral choice, and that’s cru cial in our culture,” he explains. “You need an issue that involves stu dent self-interest, but not only that. You also need moral outrage.” “The large, highly visible move ment you see now is not a rebirth,” said Josh Nessen, a leader of the Co lumbia protest and now a staffer at the American Committee on Africa (ACOA). “It was always there, at least in root form.” Williams at the Daily Texan claims that the November Presidential elec tion got students thinking about po litical issues. “The University Repub licans were able to sign up about 800 people, and the Young Democrats pulled together just as many.” The big question now facing stu dent activists is whether or not they will be able to sustain their move ment. One presumably necessary in gredient for success is the ability to win victories. On this score the activists can claim some progress. They take credit for helping to pressure Con gress to moderate White House poli cy on Central America, and making the arms race and nuclear policy sub jects of acceptable living room dis cussion in Middle America. A more tangible result is the grow ing list of universities and municipal and state governments that are with drawing investment funds from South Africa. Yet doubt remains regarding the future ofthe movement. McFetridge, for one, isn’t making any bets. “By the end of the Spring semester things fell off (Continued on page 13) ► HEATHER VIEREGG, DAILY COLORADAN October 1985 Ampersand 7