“Radical protesting just isn’t what used to be,” a friend remarked to me on Voorhees Mall as the Student Walk out began last Thursday.
Something just didn’t seem right about the Walk out Against the Iraq War. Walking out of classes, gathering at the Vietnam War memorial, chanting anti-war slogans, then marching around campus one day a year echoes a romantic view of protest culture.
The students organizing and participating in the Walk out seem to be grabbing for tactics of the past. Another friend remarked, “Walking out of your class and shirking your academic responsibility one day a year is going to affect no change. If you truly want to accomplish something, you need to realize that more drastic and serious measures need to be taken.”
In the 1960s black students at Rutgers ran a successful campaign of protests to enact change in the University’s attitude toward minority students, climaxing with the creation of the Educational Opportunity Fund. Teach-ins were held, and buildings were taken over. The students successfully moved mountains in the administration. Throughout the South, young students organized sit-ins and protests in order to rid the country of segregation in the 1960s. Facing brutal violence and arrests from the police, they broke the South of the entrenched “separate but equal” racial prejudice by sheer willpower. The protests of the Vietnam War throughout the nation were strongest on college campuses like Rutgers in 1965, when Professor of History Eugene Genovese openly lauded a Viet Cong victory during an on-campus teach-in. While this became a public issue, former President Mason Gross did not dismiss him for the remark, citing the professor’s right to academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Student and University dissent and protest have historically been an organizing force in 20th century America. It has brought about major change from the very heirs of this country. Fighting for education, social justice or peace, students have been at the heart of these causes. They are the organizing forces in universities, where, like Gross exemplified, the freedom of speech and expression is explicitly protected.
Why don’t the protest tactics of yesterday work today? Why did so many students that opposed the war opt to stay in class or not show up to the rally? It is not the motives of the student organizers that are misguided - opposition for the war in Iraq is at its highest - only their methods are at fault. This war is not Vietnam. It never was. Why would the same tactics of dissent work?
Since then, a lot has changed, from cell phones to the Internet, but most importantly, radical student protest has become institutionalized. It is expected on college campuses that students will protest when given the chance. The Walk out was even funded by the University. The Rutgers University Student Assembly gave the organizers of the Walk out $2,500 and helped them interface with public safety officials to organize a mass exodus from classrooms and march around campus.
Take the movie PCU, where protest culture is lampooned from neo-feminists step chanting outside a “chauvinistic penis party” to vegetarians picketing outside their dining hall against the slaughter of animals. The absurdity ends in the movie with a parodist protest chant against anymore protesting: “We’re not gonna protest! We’re not gonna protest!” Protest culture is now a fond memory of our professors and parents, who may have had the chance to go to Woodstock or organize mass draft card burnings. It is no longer ours.
The age of protest is over in the age of entertainment. The biggest gathering of students is for football or Rutgersfest, not Tent State or war protests. A student section of thousands fills on Saturdays for home football games, yet a gathering against easily the biggest mess this country has seen on this side of the new millennium can only muster 300 or so on campus?