A moment of silence: Student protest patterns after Sept. 11th

When J.T. Miller '70 was an undergraduate at Princeton, the nation, to him, seemed to be rushing toward disaster in its involvement in the Vietnam War. The war, along with the civil rights movement, was one of a few key events that led his class to question everything about America's ideals.

"My generation grew up believing in the central righteousness of America," he said. "But we were seeing our friends going over [to Vietnam] and fighting, some of them dying, and no one could explain to us very clearly why we were doing this."

In Miller's senior year at the University, the conflict came to a head. The first draft lotteries began. Miller can remember gathering with friends in a dorm room, drinking beer and watching the events unfold on television — like a twisted bingo game. It was common knowledge that a low lottery number was probably worth a trip to the jungle and a possible death sentence.

"If there was ever an excuse for drinking, this was it," Miller said. "There was a gallows humor to it."

That spring, in 1970, "the campus was verging on chaos," Miller explained. Students were protesting outside the Institute for Defense Analysis, an organization unaffiliated with the University whose office was behind the E-quad. The New Jersey State Police marched in to protect the Institute.

On May 6th, the University went on strike. "There were no classes, no exams, no comprehensives," Miller said. "All we had to do was hand in a thesis and wait for commencement."

Years later, Miller returned to Princeton to help with the graphics for the history book "Princeton University: The First 250 Years," and ended up staying as a house historian of sorts with the University's department of Princetoniana.

In the wake of Sept. 11th, as the United States prepared to conduct airstrikes in Afghanistan, many were interested — and perhaps a little anxious — to see the reactions of today's college-age generation.

According to articles in major newspapers, student responses to the war have been varied, but lean toward support of the effort. In a Sept. 21st article, the New York Times reported that there had been peace demonstrations held the previous day on 146 campuses in 36 states. Gradually, though, public opinion seems to have shifted in favor of the government's actions. According to a Nov. 4 article in the Washington Post, a poll of 1,200 undergraduates nationwide showed that almost 80 percent supported airstrikes in Afghanistan and about 60 percent — compared with 36 percent a year ago — had faith in the federal government "to do the right thing most of the time."

Articles in Newsday, the Times-Union in Albany, N.Y. and the New York Times have returned to such former protest strongholds as the University of Michigan, SUNY Albany, Skidmore and the University of California-Berkeley to observe undergraduates' prevailing attitudes about the war. Overall, the articles found, students take sides — either anti-war or pro-war — but do so quietly and back their views with little action.

On Princeton's campus, the war protest pattern has essentially followed the national model. On Sept. 20th — when discussions of airstrikes first began — the Princeton Peace Network, founded shortly after Sept. 11th, held a protest that attracted a few hundred supporters, a mix of students, faculty and Princeton residents. Enthusiasm for the cause appeared to have waned, though, by their second demonstration, an Oct. 7th candle-lit vigil, which 100 people attended.

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There are many theories as to why there has been less obvert objection to the war in Afghanistan than to the war in Vietnam in the1960s and 1970s. One speculation is that the personal nature of the Sept. 11th attacks has united Americans against terrorism.

"In this case, we were directly attacked in the homeland," said Eric Wang '02, a member of the Princeton Committee Against Terrorism. "It has also been a just war that has been conducted morally."

Wang also suggested that the efficiency of the airstrikes and the low number of civilian deaths have deadened the anti-war movement. "A lot of the protests were banking on this being an unsuccessful war with lots of casualties," he said. "The success [of the operation] has played a large role in going against the [anti-war] claims . . . the grounds they would have protested on."

Zia Mian, a Wilson School faculty member and activist in the Princeton Peace Network, suggests other reasons for the patterns in today's anti-war demonstrations.

Mian rejects comparisons between the Vietnam War and the airstrikes in Afghanistan for a number of reasons. Vietnam was on a larger scale, in terms of troops and casualties. Besides, opposition to the war grew over many years, Mian said.

"The Vietnam war started in about 1964," Mian said. "But everyone only remembers the protests beginning in 1968, after four years of continuous warfare, of American troops there, on the ground, year after year, with thousands of [American] casualties."

A larger issue in the lack of peace protests, according to Mian, is the fact that the college-age generation has never witnessed a large-scale war. Instead of the problems of war and peace, he said, today's youth has previously focused on issues like the environment, sweatshop labor and economic injustice.

"There is no institutional memory [of war], so what most people [of this generation] know about war is through films and books," Mian said. "The peace movement kind of contracted because of the absence of the fear [of war]."

Mian predicts that anti-war protests will grow as awareness increases. "Slowly, I think, the peace movement is regrouping, and people are starting to bring the questions [of war and peace] back," Mian said.

Mian pointed out that the University has a tradition of "radical activist politics that most students never talk about or even know about." In 1978, Princeton students stormed Nassau Hall and occupied it for three days, forcing the University to abandon stock shares in then-apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, there were protests against American involvement in Latin American politics, and in the 1990s, sweatshops were the issue.

Protests of issues in international policy are not the only demonstrations on Princeton's campus.

Nicholas Guyatt GS, head of the Worker's Rights Organizing Committee, discussed some of the difficulties of organizing protests at Princeton. WROC, founded to advance the rights of sweatshop workers worldwide, has also moved into workers' rights on the Princeton campus. One of WROC's most powerful tools, Guyatt said, is public attention.

"We're kind of an embarrassment movement — that's the way Princeton seems to work," Guyatt said. "If you can mobilize on [a campus] issue, Princeton's just kind of embarrassed that there's an injustice . . . and is eager to try and avoid scandal."

For organizations protesting broader issues, Guyatt said, there are greater challenges. While faculty openly support WROC, Guyatt said that "faculty are much more wary of getting into war protests" and the like. There is also the problem of finding a wider audience when addressing international issues and reconciling undergraduate and graduate student differences, he said.

"There are tons of things to make it harder to motivate students here at Princeton than anywhere else," Guyatt said, citing student workloads and graduate and undergraduate student relations. "When grad students get involved, it can almost be off-putting to undergrads," he said. "I think that's a definite problem . . . for anyone who wants to try and organize a protest."

When J.T. Miller looks at Princeton students today, over thirty years after his graduation, he's grateful they don't have to go through an experience like that of the Class of 1970.

"Sometimes students view themselves in a slightly negative way because they're not as political as we were. I think that's a misperception," Miller said, referring to current Princeton students. "You're really very fortunate that [despite this war], you don't have the distraction of a nation divided to put a big cloud over everything."