Protesters now and then

With the current war in Iraq magnifying anti-war activity on campus, several Tufts professors have commented that a range of both similarities and differences exist between the current campus anti-war movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s.

The protesting tradition at Tufts that began with the Vietnam War nearly 30 years ago initiated the change in campus activist movements. After the first anti-war protests, a noticeable difference existed on campus, according to University Professor Sol Gittleman. "In the 1950s it was Pleasantville," he said. "You'll never get it that way again; we've gotten what we always wanted to have -- diversity."

Campus activism during Vietnam was just the beginning. Students and faculty have since protested everything from a lack of racial minorities in Tufts construction crews to a wave of dorm drug busts. Although they have not always been as successful as they might wish, activists have left a profound mark on Tufts, as well as the nation.

Current students may scoff at rallies of only a couple hundred students marching around campus. However, even during the 1960s, at schools such as the University of California at Berkeley -- a focal point for many anti-Vietnam protests -- a majority of the campus was never involved in protesting, said Marty Sherwin, a History professor at Tufts.

In fact, according to physics professor and Tufts Coalition to Opposing the War in Iraq (TCOWI) organizer Gary Goldstein, "we now have more support for this particular political issue than we have had for a long time. Student involvement is going up and up."

But, he said, "it took years to build up to [this] level."

Faculty involvement has also been a factor in campus activism, both now and in the past. This year, professors helped found and organize TCOWI and expressed their opposition to the war in other ways.

Although Goldstein feels that the anti-War movement is really student-led, and that the professors and students interact as peers in TCOWI, he admitted that "there is right now more faculty involvement than there has been for a while."

"The war is very much with us, so people want to do something with it," he said.

Gittleman, however, feels that this is nothing out of the ordinary, and that faculty generally do get involved in protest movements.

"They believe this is an inalienable right," he said, linking this attitude to the creation of the tenure system in the 1950s. "With tenure came security."

Comparisons to past protests are inevitable, Gittleman said. "There is a certain amount of reliving."

At the same time, Sherwin said, today's protests are not merely imitations of past protests, but follow in a "very important tradition." The timing is also different. The anti-war movement in the case of Vietnam did not begin until the United States had been involved for many years -- whereas the current movement preceded the conflict.

Additionally, the wars themselves are very different, Sherwin said. "Different in every way, except that we're getting in where we don't belong," he said.

There are, of course, many similarities as well. "There's a big similarity in the David and Goliath aspect -- and David won the last time," Gittleman said.

While some aspects of protests have remained the same -- such as the type of moratorium on classes held in March, which Goldstein said "occurred many times" before -- other parts of activism have changed profoundly over the years, namely at the organizational level.

Technology is a factor that has changed the activist movement profoundly. This "mind boggling" phenomenon, as Gittleman phrased it, has allowed organizers to instantly be in touch with a long list of followers. It has also allowed for national and worldwide coordination -- as was seen earlier this year at the Feb. 15 protests in New York against the then-impending war on Iraq.

According to Goldstein, protests in the past centered more on "individual action" undertaken by campuses, as opposed to the national organization and communication seen today.