Still the Earth Jumps Back
Student Uprisings Then and Now

By Will Parrish

On February 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked to be served a cup of coffee. This simple but defiant act touched off a monumental southern black civil rights movement, out of which emerged numerous other nationwide political movements for fundamental change. The sum of these movements altered countless aspects of US culture, while bringing about numerous legislative reforms in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
On March 22, 1968, eight students at Nanterre University outside of Paris broke into the university dean’s office, occupying it for three days as a protest against the overcrowding of their university and the recent arrest of six of their peers in the French peace movement. The dramatic, improbable chain of events that ensued resulted in a near-revolution, with hundreds of thousands of students boycotting in the streets and over 12 million workers out on strike.

In the late-’90s, a decentralized, leaderless network of students and youth from across Serbia came together under a common goal — ending the brutal dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic — and a common strategy -- undermining the three main “pillars” upholding Milosevic’s rule. By October 2000, the country’s elites had been thrown into such disarray that the students, joined finally by activists from various other segments of society, swept Milosevic from power and ushered in a new era of democratic possibility in their country.

Dating from the 1200s, when students at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna began to demand more power over university affairs, students the world over have participated in — and been at the forefront of — mass political movements. The list of these movements’ triumphs is as long as you want to make it.
In relating these inspirational stories, I hope to instill in UCSB DisOrientation Guide readers an ambitious sense of what is possible for our own activism. Whether we know it or not, we have in us the capacity to do just as much as the students of the past (nay, much more!). But I also hope to challenge what may be the central myth preventing the great masses among us from recognizing the disempowering, unengaging, and — quite frankly — oppressive political system we currently live in for what it is: the idea that all legitimate power in society comes from the top-down.
In reality, it is not mainstream politicians, In reality, it is not mainstream politicians, corporate executives and military officials, but rather people far removed from these centers of establishment power, who have initiated most of the major progressive social changes we now regard as fundamental to our lives. As MIT linguistics professor and US foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky writes, “All over the place, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”

In other words, if we realized the magnitude of our ability to change the world, we would act much differently. Instead of being cynical and subdued in regard to the present political system, we — thousands of people right here in Santa Barbara, along with millions of others in similar social positions — might be aroused to take up the struggle for a better day.

A Short History of Student Activism

Students have long occupied a special role in the context of mass political activism, both in Santa Barbara and — as evidenced by my earlier references to the French and Serbian student movements — all over the world. This most righteous of traditions stems largely from the nature of the university experience itself: College is invariably a time for young people to experiment with their identities and, by extension, with improving the world at large.

While the late-1960s and the early-’70s marked by far the largest student insurgency the world has yet to witness, the dawn of what might be called the “modern” student movement (in the US, that is — student movements in many other countries matured much earlier) took place a century ago, with the formation of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) in 1905. While the ISS’ activities were mostly comprised of discussion groups on socialist theory and current events, the group nevertheless made a significant mark on thousands of students of the era.

The student movement became increasingly radicalized and action-oriented during the Depression era. The formation of the American Student Union in the ‘30s was one barometer of this trend. During its peak, the ASU boasted over 500,000 nationwide members. Its agenda -- much of it very successful -- included securing federal aid for higher education, abolishing the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corp requirement for boys, academic freedom, and racial equality.

The World War II era was a much quieter time for activism on the whole, at least in the US. Students in other countries, however, instigated various forms of large-scale mutiny. In 1956, Hungarian students sparked the Hungarian Revolution, which for a brief time brought the Soviet Union to its knees. Students also played a crucial role in the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the global nuclear freeze movement, and a variety of others.

In the ‘60s, campuses the world over were set ablaze — often literally. Black students in the south initiated major civil rights demonstrations, and the initiated major civil rights demonstrations, and the wealthier white student classes soon followed suit. By the second half of the decade, hundreds of thousands of people on campuses nationwide had taken up agitating for black civil rights, student rights, and/or US withdrawal from Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) — to mention only a few of the more prevalent causes.

It was during this time that the University of California established itself as a hub for student activism on a grand scale. On September 2, 1964, several thousand students at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza surrounded a cop car in which was detained student Jack Weinberg, who had violated the university’s recent ban on distributing political literature. One by one, for over 18 hours, students mounted the car and gave passionate speeches regarding their right to freedom of speech. One year later, students had won basic free speech rights at virtually every major university campus in the US.

Meanwhile, students in France, England, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and Mexico were engaged in mass civil disobedience in protest as well. Some of these protests (as in the US) were marked by violent repression. Tragedy struck when, during a protest by over 15,000 students in Mexico City on October 2, 1968, hundreds were brutally murdered by the Mexican police and army (but only after receiving the US government’s encouragement to do so).

Back in the US, on May 4, 1970, four peaceful student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio were murdered by federal troops who had occupied the campus per order of President Nixon. The student insurgency reached a volatile peak in the wake of this tragedy; from May 5-8, 1970, over four million students took part in protests of such intensity that 536 schools nationwide were shut down completely for some period of time, 51 of them for the remainder of the year (including UCSB). The intensity of the student struggle prompted the US to withdraw troops from Cambodia, while marking a major intensification of the grassroots struggle that finally ended the US occupation of Vietnam in 1975.

Student Movements Then and Now

The student movements of the past 30 years have not been as visible as those of the ‘60s and early-’70s, but student political organizing on the whole has progressed in significant ways. The environmental, American Indian, feminist, queer, Chicano, and other movements

that emerged out of the ‘60s period have combined to make today’s activism greatly more diverse and decentralized. In many ways, student activism now is more effective than its more widely-recognized ‘60s counterpart, being that it is much more rooted in and responsive to the needs of distinct communities (the Serbian student movement is one example of this trend on a global scale), rather than trying to impose a one-size-fits-all solution to complex problems.

Among the most notable movements of the last few decades have been the South African divestment campaign of the ‘80s, which played a central role in toppling the South African Apartheid government (this campaign was particularly strong at the UC, where the Regents held over $3 billion in investments in the South African government); the anti-sweatshop labor movement; the Free Burma campaign whereby student activism compelled Pepsi to divest its holdings in the Burmese dictatorship; and countless others, many of which are consciously part of the international “globalization from below” movement.

Today, the UC is emerging as a vital hub of the resurgent student activism of today. A precursor of what is likely to come took place this past spring at UC Santa Cruz. In the space of only three weeks during April, hundreds of UCSC students non-violently kicked military recruiters out of a campus job fair, roughly 1,000 mobilized to completely shut down the campus during the UC-wide workers strike and 500-1,000 participated in a visionary action called Tent University Santa Cruz (www.tentstate.com).

As you read through the pages of the DisOrientation Guide, I encourage you to reflect on your potential role as a student activist at UC Santa Barbara, not only in the context of the rich student movement history I just described, but also in the context of what it means to be a UC student. The UC is intersected with the most powerful government, military, and business interests on the planet. Therefore, indirectly, UC students, acting in their capacity as students, have the unique opportunity to wage campaigns that will change the world, as have so many students for generations. You have the power. — you need only discover how to use it.

Will Parrish is a 2004 graduate of UC Santa Cruz who currently works and lives in Santa Barbara.

Want to read on?

Online:
www.fsm-a.org – The Free Speech Movement Archives
www.campusactivism.org – General resource on student activism
www.hippy.com – A fetishized history of the 1960s.
http://newdeal.feri.org/students/ - Student Activism of the ‘30s

Books:
*Student Resistance: A History of The Unruly Subject by Mark Edelman Boren
*SDS by Kirkpatrick Sale
*In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the ‘60s by Clayborne Carson
*New Voices: Student Activism of the ‘80s and ‘90s by Tony Velella