Unlikely Hotbeds
News: Student activism is taking root on campuses with little or no history of dissent.
October 15, 2003
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Last Halloween, Nicole Aro dressed as a tomato. Inventive as it was, the costume wasn't intended for trick-or-treating. Rather, Aro, a member of the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition at the University of Chicago, was in costume to lead a cross-campus protest march.
At issue was the university's contract with Taco Bell, whose tomato suppliers are accused of exploiting migrant farm laborers. For six months, a coalition of student groups had been calling for the school to cut its ties with the fast food giant, but the university had stonewalled. So, when Aro and the other round, red marchers pitched up at the administration's offices last October, no one expected a quick resolution.
Then, a week after the march, however, the school gave in. It was one of the biggest victories ever for the national "Boot the Bell" campaign, and a major triumph for Aro's group. The school was trying to improve its image, and talk of sweatshops is bad for public relations, says Aro, a 19-year old junior from Philadelphia. "We were embarrassing them pretty badly."
Like Aro, Ella Hereth is a member of the Anti-Sweatshop Coalition. Over the past year, the 21-year old senior and Gender Studies major says, campus attitudes shifted dramatically. The university, which she says had been generally indifferent to progressive causes, embraced the "Boot the Bell" campaign.
"It's not that people didn't care about workers' rights before the Bell campaign," Hereth says. It's that "a lot of people that did care didn't think that organizing on the University of Chicago campus was worth the effort."
The resurgence of student activism at the Chicago campus -- on March 5, hundreds of students walked out of classes to protest the US invasion of Iraq -- is just one aspect of a shift in attitude on dozens of campuses across the country. According to a recent survey by the Higher Education Research Institute, this year's crop of college students is the most politically engaged in years, and increasingly liberal on social issues like support for gay rights and marijuana legalization.
Protests over the war in Iraq, of course, dominated campus calendars this past year, but it was by no means the only issue under discussion. Indeed, student activism appears to be thriving, no matter the topic -- from sweatshops to the morning-after pill. What's more, students are discovering their voices -- and effecting real change -- on campuses not known for activism.
The University of California, Berkeley, certainly does not fall into that category. But Desirree Abshire, now a student at Berkeley, actually cites her experience at San Francisco's City College, a campus of the sprawling California Community College system, for launching her into activism. The first in her family to go to college, the 23-year old Abshire says she was prodded into activism by Gov. Gray Davis's plan to cut more than $500 million from the community college system budget while imposing massive tuition hikes. Community colleges may not be known as hotbeds of activism, but Davis' proposals forced many students to take a stand, Abshire says.
Abshire plunged into the organizing effort, which came to a head in March as 10,000 students gathered in Sacramento for a march to the state Capitol. Further rallies followed, and Davis soon backtracked, halving the proposed cuts and tuition increases. In the process, Abshire notes, the protests "cut through a lot of stereotypes" about community colleges, where students rarely live on campus and there is little sense of school spirit.
"When you cut something that's so important to so many people -- there's a community college in every community -- there's going to be a march," she says. "There'll be people there."
Andres Quintero agrees. A former student at San Jose's Evergreen Valley College and regional representative to the California Student Association of Community Colleges, Quintero saw the protests as a sign that community college activism had arrived.
"Even though the restoration wasn't complete," he says, "we showed that we [could] mobilize when it came down to it." Further, Quintero says, the Sacramento march proved that students from disparate backgrounds could unite, and could actually influence policy-makers.
"The culminating moment [was] when [our] chancellor himself ran out there and he started ranting, voicing his opinion right in front of his bosses' office," says Quintero, now a 23-year old junior at Berkeley. "He was talking just like a college student, telling it like it is."
Thousands of miles away, in Virginia's conservative Shenandoah Valley, students were shaking up another campus rarely associated with activism. In April, without consulting students, the James Madison University governing board banned the distribution of the so-called morning-after pill. Campus reaction was angry, and nearly instantaneous. Spreading the word via e-mail and instant messenger, student activists collected close to 3,000 signatures in just one day -- far more names than were needed to introduce a bill to the Student Senate condemning the ban. The bill passed the Senate by a crushing 54-6 margin.
Levar Stoney, the Student Body President and one of the protest leaders, can only marvel at the impassioned student response.
"This is not a very activist campus," says Stoney, a 22-year old Public Administration and Political Science major. "But when a lot of people heard about [the board's decision], they sprung into an activist form that I haven't seen here in a while."
The campus debate ignited controversy across the country. Conservative pundits and religious leaders, decrying the morning-after pill as an "abortion agent," condemned the students' actions while lauding the university's board. One student leader appeared on MSNBC, responding to right-wing criticism by noting that, according to the Food and Drug Administration, the pill is merely a form of emergency contraception. Stoney even agreed to appear on conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham's show.
"They tried to get me," he remembers. "It was two-against-one, but I held my own."
As the new school year starts at James Madison, the ban still stands, but activists aren't backing down. Student leaders are hoping to convince the board to revisit the issue, giving students a say in the decision.
"It's a student service issue," Stoney says. "It wasn't about abortion or politics or anything like that. Students should have a right to weigh in on the matter."
It is that simple suggestion, that students' opinions and voices should matter, which links Aro and Hereth and their fight for workers' rights to Abshire and Quintero and their campaign for adequate funding to Stoney and his fellow students at James Madison. Long heard on campuses with activist legacies, it is increasingly being heard in places where student dissent has been rare, or even nonexistent, from young people who have not been encouraged to take a stand.
"I didn't come out of high school with the view that I had the ability to further myself," Abshire explains. "I went from 'That's not the kind of thing people like me do', to 'Why not me?'"
