Also in the last few years, college students have acted to support local causes. For example, students have banded with university workers to lobby their schools to pay all employees a living wage. The movement began in 2002, when Harvard students staged a 21-day sit-in that won a “parity wage” for all Harvard employees. Since then, students have organized protests for living wages at Brown, Stanford, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Yale, among other schools. At Yale, 400 students were among 800 arrested in September 2002 for blocking streets to demand a living wage for Yale employees.

Though they often shy away from the radicalism of the Vietnam era, students remain active proponents of important social causes; it is just that their involvement fluctuates. “From time to time there have been outbreaks of organizing energy on college campuses, even during periods of relative inactivity,” said Mark Rudd, who served as president of the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which took control of five Columbia buildings in 1968. “For example, in the ’80s there was a huge divestment campaign on many campuses, including Columbia. It was part of the larger anti-apartheid, South African liberation movement. And it won! In the nineties there was a large and similarly successful anti-sweatshop movement on campuses. Most generalizations about student quiet tend to forget these outbreaks.” Rather than rising up only when wars become exceedingly bloody, students have repeatedly organized to advertise and protest injustice in many forms.

Yet students remain largely silent on the Iraq War. Though many have protested since before the invasion in March 2003, student activity has been miniscule compared to adult organizing. This inactivity stands in sharp contrast to the activism surrounding Darfur, a cause for which students have organized as extensively as adults.

The natures and scales of the wars can help explain the different levels of student anti-war activism during the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Battle has raged in Iraq for four years, and the 3,100 American deaths as of February 2007 are only half the number of Americans killed in Vietnam in 1966 alone.

Additionally, not a single American has been drafted since 1973, a difference which may affect national opinion more than anything else.

“The presence of the draft touched almost every family in the country,” said Ed Felton of the ANSWER Coalition, a group that has organized dozens of anti-war rallies since 2003. “For anyone of draft age or any parents with children of draft age, the war lasted long enough to raise fears that it would continue until they or their children were drafted.” Without that immediate connection to their lives, Felton told the Globalist, “It’s not people’s instinct to wake up one morning and realize they need to be part of a militant social movement.”

While many students are activists, their causes are varied. And the global connection students feel—evidenced by the support for peace in Darfur—makes the low level of anti-war activism surprising, especially given the history of student activism during the Vietnam War.

But history may make this comparison more glaring, if American forces remain in Iraq and the death toll continues to rise. The student response cannot go unnoticed.

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