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Antiwar Speakers on Campus are Lecturers, Not Students, This Time
SAN FRANCISCO - Dan Lowenstein passionately opposes the war in Iraq and recently helped stage an antiwar teach-in at UC San Francisco. "We must listen to our conscience and speak out," he told the hundreds of people who had gathered.
Lowenstein is no student organizer; he's a noted professor and vice chairman of the department of neurology at UCSF.
Four years into the war, student protests at campuses across the country have been rare, but a handful of academics have begun speaking out and conducting studies within their own disciplines to make the case against the conflict.
Lowenstein, who took part in protests against the Vietnam War as a high school and university student in Colorado, says the absence of a draft and the lack of televised images of battlefield body bags or coffins coming home have helped keep protests to a minimum. He calls the conflict in Iraq "the silent war."
At Harvard University, public policy professor Linda Bilmes has co-written a study that estimates the war will cost more than $1 trillion, far more than the Bush administration's projections. Bilmes also addressed the teach-in, which was attended mostly by doctors and medical students.
"Why is there no outrage?" asked Bilmes, who was an assistant secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration. "Why are the campuses not overflowing with students saying, 'What is going on here?' One answer is we are not seeing the true cost of the war."
The lack of protest can be attributed in part to a change in character: Today's students are more serious about getting a degree, entering the working world and making money. And, unlike the Vietnam War, the conflict in Iraq does not play out against a backdrop of civil rights protests and counterculture rebellion.
Furthermore, the Bush administration has been skillful in limiting the fallout at home by controlling visual images of the war dead and declining to release information on the number of Americans wounded or the number of Iraqi casualties. For example, in its count of the wounded, the Pentagon does not include soldiers who didn't require an airlift to a military hospital.
As a result, some student activists find other issues easier to embrace. In May, dozens went on a hunger strike and disrupted a meeting of the UC Board of Regents over the university's participation in the development of nuclear weapons. Eleven were arrested and hauled from the room.
In May, students at Stanford University staged a sit-in outside the president's office to protest the use of sweatshop labor in the manufacture of apparel with Stanford's logo. Outside, some students took off their clothes to draw attention to the issue. (A month earlier, students held a similar, but clothed, sit-in outside the president's office at USC.) Later, Stanford worked out an agreement to address the students' concerns.
Stanford student Daniel Shih, a leader of the protest, said he was certain that all of the sweatshop demonstrators opposed the war in Iraq. As a protest target, however, it seemed too distant, and ending it seemed unattainable.
"The war in Iraq is a huge issue, but it's disconnected," he said. "At this institution, we focus our influence on our administration's policies. With the sweatshop campaign, we feel we can make concrete change."
Mark Rudd, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s, said many of today's students oppose the war but lack organizing skills and the belief that they can make a difference.
"There are a lot of people on campus who are antiwar, but they don't know what to do," said Rudd, who taught math at a community college in New Mexico for 25 years before retiring in December. "There has been a loss of that feeling that individual actions can mean something. It was the opposite in the '60s."
But Rudd, who spent seven years underground in the 1970s, said he is optimistic that students will become more organized as the war continues; he noted that students on many campuses have begun forming new chapters of SDS.
Tom Hayden, a radical leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement who later served in the state Legislature, said the Bush administration has kept opposition to the war in check by minimizing its effect on the daily lives of Americans.
With today's volunteer Army and the administration policy of repeatedly deploying the same units to Iraq, he noted, a relatively small part of the population is directly affected by the war. Hayden said he recently taught a class on Iraq at Pitzer College, and only one of his 38 students had a relative stationed there.
In the 1960s, the possibility of being drafted at the age of 18 - before they could even vote in those days - compelled students to decide where they stood on Vietnam. Being summoned for a dehumanizing pre-induction physical brought home the reality of the war.
The primary reason for the lack of protest "is the absence of a draft. Period. Full stop," said Hayden, who recently wrote a book, "Ending the War in Iraq." "If they instituted a draft, there would be 1,000 riots the next week."
The involvement of academics in antiwar activities was evident at the UCSF teach-in.
Bilmes, the Harvard professor, told the audience of her $1-trillion to $2-trillion estimate of the cost of the war.
She said her assessment, co-written with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, goes beyond combat operations to include such things as the replacement of military equipment, decades of medical benefits for badly injured vets and the social cost of not investing war funds in the U.S. economy.
"We have to ask, if we had known not only the human cost but the economic cost of this war four years ago, whether we would have invaded Iraq in the first place," she said.
As the war drags on, Bilmes said later, more scholars are concluding that they must speak out.
"The faculty is waking up in the morning, feeling physically ill reading the newspaper," she said. "They're asking, 'What can I do in my discipline?' "
The San Francisco audience also heard from three UCSF professors. One of them told of the psychological damage to children in war zones, and the other two described the high percentage of brain injuries suffered by American soldiers.
"The signature injury of this war is mild traumatic brain injury," said professor Charles Marmer, vice chairman of the school's department of psychiatry.
Dr. Richard Garfield, a professor of nursing at Columbia, outlined epidemiological studies in Iraq by U.S. and Iraqi doctors in 2004 and 2006 that concluded the Iraqi death toll was far higher than previously believed.
The 2006 study, which surveyed 1,849 randomly selected households in 47 Iraqi communities, concluded that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war. The total was 13 times higher than the highest estimates at the time.
The peer-reviewed study was published in the Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, but was criticized by President Bush for using a flawed methodology.
Lowenstein said it was no coincidence that he and other physicians are becoming outspoken critics of the war. The public may be insulated from the war, he said, but doctors see the damage acutely.
"It's not bubbling up from the students," he said. "Faculty and staff who know the Vietnam era are much more aware. The parallels seem pretty obvious as we listen to the administration talk about the war in Iraq."
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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15 Comments so far
Show Allone of the most frustrating things a parent has to do is watch his child have to learn all the lessons that the parent has been through. it is the same here. like a parent who trys to teach, the ones experienced in the vietman war protest must now try to teach.
Well, it's about time the American academy started making some waves. These professors deserve to be joined by all of their colleagues.
It has baffled me that more faculty haven't spoken out against the war and the Bush administration -- especially full professors with tenure. It's for just this sort of situation that they have academic freedom. What have they got to lose? If there are not enough shocking images of the war in the media, then screen any one of the dozens of independent films that have been produced over the last four years. I count 24 in my own personal DVD library. *Why We Fight* and *War Made Easy* are ideal for classroom screenings. Although it doesn't feature blood-and-gore, *Hijacking Catastrophe* is also excellent for a student audience -- and it's just under an hour, so it would fit nicely into virtually any university course. It features several of those rare academics who have been speaking out since this fiasco began.
I am actually quite appalled that university faculty would allow Churchill and Finkelstein to be hung out to dry without mounting a cross-country protest -- a revolution so noisy that it would bring down several spineless university administrations. Whatever happened to the "public intellectual" component of academic responsibility? So much for all the right-wing whining and complaining about the "liberal academy."
Look, even here in Canada, where the academy is more conservative than the Church, there has been more anti-war and anti-imperialist teaching activity than just about anywhere in the US as far as I can tell.
The only reason I can come up with for this virtual silence is the Patriot Act. Is there a tenure-busting clause somewhere in there?
It is easy to believe that someone in a financially comfortable situation finds it easier to start a protest. Remember that today that cost of college is a great deal higher than it was in the sixties; many students are also forced to work in addition to attending classes, even when they know the BA will be worth a lot less than it was 30-40 years ago. The way to keep someone from speaking out is to keep them financially insecure, and the administration has succeeded in doing that to young leftists.
I'm also quite sure that if there were thousands of riots (during which idiots who said in articles that they wanted the draft back would have their windows smashed and their house torched), Bush's mercenaries would commit Kent State to the one thousandth power. In fact, the administration is declaring itself above congressional oversight, and otherwise doesn't care about anything that other people say, think, or do against it; the anti-war protest movement started internationally before the war even began, and it did nothing. Why do you expect it to work now?
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Actually, though, I do believe in action despite any and all obstacles; I do believe in revolution, and riots. But it really does start with YOU first, not with deploring that others aren't taking action, least of all young people.
...a loss of that feeling that individual actions can mean something. It was the opposite in the '60s."
Well, no, individual action rarely does any good. It is COLLECTIVE action that gets the goods.
But from the media, to long work hours/low wage/frantic consumption, to the very layout of the streets in our largely privatized communities, the current end-stage capitalist system is unexcelled in obliterating solidarity or collective action.
As long as the Professors do not claim they speak for the University or use class time for political speech unrelated to the curriculum there should be no problem in what they say. That is what free speech is.
I heard recently about a high school class in current events that was not allowed to discuss the Iraq war. Misses the whole point of this type of class.
The headline is rather unfortunate. "Lecturer" generally connotes adjunct faculty who are hired on a contractual per-term basis and to whom the university has no responsibilities beyond a (slave-wage) paycheck. The article makes clear that the faculty who are participating are tenured and tenure-track professors--even department heads, not loosely-affiliated rabble-rousers.
Oh, and Al Gore was a big time supporter of that war. Keep that in mind when even considering him for president.
"The campuses are hotbeds of student rest."
CLARIFICATION-- the word "die" should come between the words "people" and "in."
"As long as the Professors do not claim they speak for the University or use class time for political speech unrelated to the curriculum there should be no problem in what they say. That is what free speech is."
As a university professor, I can't think of one discipline, from fine arts to physics, where the current wars, global economic darwinism, environmental disgrace, politicized religious interference, or any of the other hundred socio-cultural-political outrages do not touch on some aspect of the curriculum. It's up to each individual professor to make the call on what is related and unrelated. THAT'S what academic freedom means.
I update the Food Not Bombs website and have the honor of talking wit hundreds of students working for peace. Yes I too am an older person and speak at many colleges but I find students are very active and dedicated to peace and social justice. They have a deep understanding of the issues and many of our volunteers started in high school or college and have gone on to work for peace after graduation. Our volunteers not only collect, cook and share free meals on the streets they study the issues and talk with the public about world events and social change. I was a student activist in the 70s and I think there is more going on on campus then most people think. I believe the media's claim that students are not organizing is part of a general effort to make people believe there is little we can do to stop the war. Breaking the media white our is hard. There are hundreds of Food Not Bombs groups all over the world. We fed the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine and started animal shelters in 24 cities in Slovakia. We cut through the wall beltween Isreal and Palistine. We provided food at over 500 peace actions the mont before the U.S. attack on Iraq. Several thousand Food Not Bombs volunteers took part in providing all the food for th esurvivors of Katrina. The American Red Cross and FEMA gave out the Food Not Bombs toll free number as the official place to find food. We also fed the rescue workers at the World Trade Center on 9/11 yet none of this made the news. Thousands of students workig hard and clear about corporate and government power all but ignored by Americas media.
www.foodnotbombs.net
zoya I can think of lots of classes where current politics is not acceptable as a topic. Organic chemistry, Geology, and most of the other hard sciences.
I was a student and my fees paid for the class time. When I got a MS as an adult I made it clear to one Professor that I was paying for covering the Curriculum of the class. I even agreed with the position they discussed but I was paying for education not a bullshit session.
Academic Freedom doesn't mean stealing the students' and parents' money by covering politics during physics class.
Would you accept as academic freedom a discussion of hemi-cellulose degradation during sulphate pulping in a political science class?
Let's also remember Slick Willy lied, and people in the Balkans died due to his "humanitarian intervention" which was all intervention and no humanitarian. But then he was, and is, a closet case Republican, as is his wife. That was a war which the USA didn't see the cost of because Americans weren't paying the price of it, but the US military was treating a big part of the Balkans as a free fire zone, and those on the receiving end of that intervention knew it was no more humanitarian than was the Vietnam War.
Actually, yes, the academic freedom that comes with tenure does mean that professors can say what they want, like it or not. Universities are not walmart; "customer service" is not the goal. But yours is such an obvious right wing fox news troll argument, meant to only blur and subvert the issue at hand that I don't know why I bother responding.