Eugene, Oregon -- As a boy, B. Trevor Dick wandered through the Umatilla National Forest in eastern Oregon with his father, marveling at the 250-foot Douglas firs. Over the years, however, he began noticing that the forests were disappearing. Timber companies were cutting down the prized trees.
“It takes 1,000 years for trees to grow that size, and 15 minutes for man to cut them down,” says Mr. Dick, now a senior at the University of Oregon here. “We have no right to be destroying such a precious resource.”
For the last three years, Mr. Dick has been working at the Survival Center -- a student-run environmental-protection group -- to stop the cutting of large, old trees. This academic year, he says, an unprecedented number of students have come by to help at the center, which was formed in 1969.
“They’re finally realizing that the planet is going to die if they don’t do something,” says Matthew P. Snider, a senior at the university who is a co-director of the center.
While many critics dismissed college students of the 1980’s as greedy, materialistic, and apathetic, students themselves say they are changing. They say student activism in the 1990’s will be stronger than in recent decades, and will have a different face.
The parents of today’s students came of age in the turbulent 1960’s, and many have told their children about that decade’s protests and rallies. But their children -- the students of the 1990’s -- are more likely to negotiate and collaborate than to demonstrate, say faculty members and administrators. They add that students now are quick to enlist the aid of legislators and are savvy about attracting press attention. Raised in an age of explosive creation of electronic gismos, many student activists employ the latest technology to further their causes.
Despite the increase in activism on some campuses, not all students are becoming involved. Many are concerned about doing well academically and have little time for anything but studying. Others hold jobs, earning money for college.
But those who do become involved are increasingly interested in causes that affect their communities and directly influence their lives, college officials say. They are focusing on such issues as cleaning and protecting the environment, abortion, the cost of higher education, diversifying the student population on their campuses, and improving housing and education for low-income people in urban areas.
While the students of the 1990’s may spurn rallies, college officials say, they will be more than willing to roll up their sleeves to join a recycling effort or tutor sixth graders.
“Students are practicing pragmatic idealism,” says Julia Scatliff, executive director of the Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL), a Minneapolis-based organization that coordinates community service by students throughout the country. “They are concerned about finding good jobs and getting decent grades. But they are also finding ways to involve themselves in their communities.”
The huge rock concerts that benefited homeless people, farmers, and famine victims in the 80’s attracted many students to social causes, students say. “The star status of music groups like U2 put forward the message that it’s cool to care,” says Tom Burke, a member of the steering committee of the Progressive Student Network. The network organizes student activism on social and political issues nationwide. Mr. Burke is a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The widening gap between rich and poor has roused apathetic students in a way no other social issue could, say faculty members. And it has led to an increase in the proportion of students who are getting involved, professors and students say.
“There were promises of affluence” in the early 1980’s, says Walter R. Allen, professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But now we are seeing the economics of deprivation. There is evidence that the system is not meeting its full potential, and students are moving from a period of arch-conservatism to a period of social activism.”
The number of students who are pressing for change appears to be growing. Attendance at the 1989 national meeting of COOL, for example, was about 1,200, compared with 125 at the 1985 meeting. Some 480 student representatives attended the annual meeting of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness last fall, compared with 127 in 1987. And work by Campus Compact, a group that organizes student volunteers, has spread from 12 campuses in 1985 to 225 today.
In 1989, students spoke out against tuition hikes at public universities in several states. At Howard University, students last year forced the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Lee Atwater, to resign from the university’s board of trustees. The students said that many of the Bush Administration’s policies were racist and that Mr. Atwater did not belong on the board of a historically black institution.
Meanwhile, the threat of a Supreme Court hostile to abortion rights has struck a chord among a generation of young women who fear they will no longer have complete control over their bodies. Officials at the National Organization for Women said that a third of the estimated 600,000 marchers at an abortion-rights rally in Washington last April were students. And thousands of other students became involved with the issue on their own campuses. Students at some institutions, including Catholic colleges, have spoken out against abortion.
“This is such a personal issue because it affects so many women our age,” says Lynn M. Veitzer, who took a year off from Cornell University to work as one of the organizers of a pro-choice group in New York called Students Organizing Students.
The abortion debate has only recently become a hot issue on campuses. But college officials expect other causes that have long been of importance to students to become even more prominent in the 1990’s.
In particular, many expect some of the most insistent voices heard on college campuses to be those of black students fighting discrimination and pressuring colleges to include the views of people of color in curricula.
“What we’re seeing is persistent racism, more virulent than in the 60’s,” says Ronald W. Walters, a professor of political science at Howard University. “And black students are fighting back and grabbing for powerful symbols like Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan. There is a high level of black political consciousness, as you see students wearing medallions and T-shirts expressing racial pride. It is translating into a higher level of political activism.”
Students also are expressing renewed interest in the environment, an issue that hasn’t been prominent on campuses since the early 1970’s. Alarmed by warnings of global warming and by pictures of oil-covered otters in the wake of the Exxon oil spill in Alaska, students are volunteering their time and energy to environmental organizations. Last fall, 1,700 gathered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a conference called Threshold, one of the largest student meetings on environmental issues held in the last decade.
Students say environmental problems that may only have been distant threats in the past seem like imminent disasters to people coming of age in the 1990’s. At the University of North Carolina, the Student Environmental Coalition has persuaded the university to stop using Styrofoam, which is not biodegradable. The university also sponsors aluminum- and newspaper-recycling projects.
Many students are choosing to work for change in the communities that border their campuses. By working in the community -- with families or youngsters, for instance -- students can see the direct results of their actions, college officials say.
“As an African-American student, I feel very fortunate, and I want to give something back to the community,” says Sean M. DeCatur, a senior at Swarthmore College who is a volunteer for a program that helps adults learn to read. Mr. DeCatur says he has also taken part in anti-drug demonstrations in a community near the college.
Other students, frustrated by the inability of many poor and minority people to find affordable housing and decent schools, are fanning out by the score to inner-city and rural communities to help tutor children and build shelters. “I get students who say, `It’s not my style to take over buildings, it’s not my style to demonstrate. But it is my style to be a big brother to an inner-city youngster,” says Kathleen L. Rice, leadership-development coordinator at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.
Not only are students becoming more involved, but their campaigns are better orchestrated. Last year, students at the University of New Mexico tried for weeks to persuade the state board of regents to enact tuition increases that were more modest than the board had planned. When the students felt their concerns had not been heard, they took over the university president’s office. They brought along word processors and facsimile machines to communicate with university officials and printed a daily newsletter to keep students and administrators informed of their activities. The students also arranged to have their meals brought in.
“These are sophisticated, professional student politicians, schooled in the latest technology,” says Margaret E. Montoya, special adviser to the president at New Mexico. “Unlike the 60’s, these students aren’t interested in confrontation. They are interested in working within the system to change things.”
Nina L. DiNatale, a junior at Bard College who helped organize students who attended an abortion-rights rally in Washington in October, concludes that it is difficult these days for students to overlook society’s problems.
“We’re moving into a time period when it isn’t enough to disagree,” she says. “You have to get off your butt and do something.”