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This Issue 02/01/2007

Also in this issue

• Paris' New Causes
• Rooters
• Biddle Law Library
• Beers from the Ceiling
• The Engineering Library
• DON'T ASK ME WHY
• Engineering a career

It's easy to be nostalgic for the actvist culture of the '60s and '70s. Students joined together in an unprecedented fashion to campaign for issues like civil rights, peace, and feminism. They took to the streets and organized sit-ins on college campuses. Though at the time their demonstrations were controversial, history has proven them strangely prescient.

Penn, though rarely radical, was not an exception. During the '60s and early '70s, sit-ins were a regular feature of campus life - the appearance, at least, of a politically engaged student body. In 1969, for instance, a six-day sit-in at College Hall precluded a University City Science Center (UCSC) expansion, returning land and funds to several thousand low-income African American residents of West Philadelphia. Student efforts also helped halt a military-funded chemical weapons program at the UCSC. The protest was entirely peaceful; dining services provided coffee for the demonstrators throughout. The Daily Pennsylvanian wrote, "You could tell these weren't hard-core revolutionaries, many were doing their homework. Sit-in tonight, go to class tomorrow." University President Gaylord Harnwell declared the sit-in, "a beacon of light amid the rather smoky battlegrounds of today's college campuses."

The magnitude of that sit-in, in the eyes of its participants, is best depicted on its initial flyer: "If America is to survive, this must stop."

Current Professor Ira Harkavy was a student leader of the '69 sit-in, chosen to negotiate with the University Trustees. He remembers that the issues at stake "were felt to be enormously significant decisions for American society and for the world."

At Penn, it's hard to locate that same idealism today. With the exception of a protest against a revised alcohol policy in 1999, there have been few mass demonstrations on campus, few visible ways in which students have engaged in issues like the war in Iraq. The relative quiet on campus has only cemented its reputation for apathy.

But is apathy really the issue? Dr. Felicity Paxton, of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, thinks students aren't sure where to begin. "We've got impossible debt, global warming, an illegal war in Iraq that has killed 3,050 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, chaos still in New Orleans -- I can see why students would pick their heads up and go, 'Holy crap! I'm going back to my books.'"

Even the biggest demonstrations, like February 2003's anti-war march in anticipation of Iraq, seemed to have little real effect. Says Wharton senior Chris Bennett, "There's so much you want to change. You have these strong opinions but all you can do is voice it. You can't make a change." Though he opposses the war, Bennett didn't "see the point" to Saturday's march.