Issue Date: Oct 18, 2004

By Ashanti M. Alvarez

Once a painter who looked to start his own business, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, prompted Don Curry to join the ranks of Rutgers students who make activism on campus a priority.

“This year is a hot presidential election,” said Curry, a 25-year-old University College student who heads up that school’s governing association and sits on the University Senate. “People feel like they want to make a change … the people here are very active.”

Progressive magazine Mother Jones agrees. That’s why Rutgers made the publication’s list of the Top 10 Activist Campuses this year. Rated number five, it’s the third time in the list’s 11-year history that Rutgers made the activist grade.

Some 600 Rutgers students – which Mother Jones termed “a small army” – made their way to Washington, D.C., in April to join the March for Women’s Lives. Bearing signs such as, “Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries,” it was the largest contingent at the pro-choice rally. “People felt strongly about these issues, especially people our age. I think a lot of men and women at Rutgers realize how close we are to losing the things that we pretty much take for granted,” said 2004 Douglass College graduate Sarah Kelly, who organized the Rutgers faction.

In the past, Mother Jones editors consulted with nonprofit activist groups to rank the schools each year. But in recent years, Tim Dickinson said the magazine has tended to rely on news making activities to form the list. Other frequent list makers have been the University of Michigan, UCLA and the University of Wisconsin.

“These campuses all have a well-earned reputation for being politically active,” said Tim Dickinson, articles editor for Mother Jones. “When you’ve got 50,000 people there’s likely to be a subset doing progressive and interesting things.” In the past, Rutgers made the cut due to its activism in the areas of gay and lesbian rights, opposition of the death penalty, women’s studies and keeping college affordable.

Lauren Michaels, the president of the student chapter of the New Jersey Public Interest Group (NJPIRG), said getting involved on campus offers students a chance to find their own niche. “I think activist organizations give students the opportunity to make the university feel a little bit smaller,” Michaels said. “We have this rap about being an apathetic age group. I think the problem is they don’t reach out to us unless we have a protest and we do a letter writing campaign. You can’t ignore a powerful group.”

Anti-war protests and campus strikes

Rutgers has a long history of activism. Paul Robeson, one of the university’s most famed graduates, became a civil rights activist. As a singer in the 1940s, he refused to sing to segregated audiences. But even staying and excelling at Rutgers was a form of activism for Robeson, who was a student from 1915 to 1919. Groups protested his presence on the university football team. He remained on the football team, despite sometimes harsh physical treatment on the field by white teammates, and went on to become a Cap and Skull member and deliver the valedictorian’s address at commencement.

Student activism flourished in the 1930s when, under the impact of the Great Depression, students became more concerned about college as an institution and its role in the social and political worlds.

In 1957, fraternity men from Alpha Gamma Rho attended a demonstration in Trenton protesting financial cutbacks. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, anti-war protests around campus flourished. In 1970, student protesters took over the Old Queens building for two days, hanging banners from its windows. The protest ended peacefully. In the 1980s, students protested over the merging of New Brunswick faculties into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That same decade, students at Rutgers, like many colleges and universities, launched protests urging Rutgers to divest all holdings in companies doing business with apartheid state South Africa. On April 12, 1985, students chained the doors of the College Avenue Student Center and conducted a monthlong takeover of the university. Scores of students camped outside the building and several launched a hunger strike. Later that year, the university voted to completely divest from South Africa.

Activism is something that has shaped the Newark campus, said Vice Provost for Student Affairs Marcia Brown. Brown’s entering class in 1975 was among the first groups of African American students to attend Rutgers Law School after the civil rights movement of the 1960s – punctuated in Newark by the rebellion in 1967 and the takeover of Conklin Hall in 1969.

“After the rebellion in Newark, the community was demanding that Rutgers open itself up,” Brown said. “Students were saying, ‘Here is Rutgers right in our community, seizing land, building buildings – and we can’t even walk on their campus’.” Spurred by a network of activists not just at Rutgers-Newark, but students from Newark high schools and the community-at-large, the leadership of the law school took the charge of diversity seriously and helped implement the first Minority Student Program. It still exists today and provides mentoring, internships and academic support to disadvantaged students, regardless of race.

“We’ve been a prominent theater for not only protests and demands for progressive change, but the campus has historically had an outreach and community service mission that has continued,” Brown said.

Demands for change also created a turbulent environment in Camden during the early 1970s. Poet Gil Scott-Heron and celestial funk-jazz musician Sun Ra performed in Camden around the same time Black students went on strike from classes after unhappy with the response to a list of demands. The requests included more Black administrators, more Black faculty, increased access to EOF programs and more university engagement in the community. Eventually, Black and Puerto Rican students at all three campuses formed an alliance.

Making headlines

Leslie Fishbein, an associate professor of American studies and Jewish studies and expert on the 1960s, questioned whether the definition of the word “activism” has changed over time and whether it has been “mainstreamed.” “There were different kinds of activism that rocked Rutgers,” Fishbein said, citing the antiwar and civil rights protests of the 1960s and 1970s. Fishbein said Mother Jones’ interpretation of the word is more inclusive and includes fewer anti-establishment movements and more actions such as the “Rock the Vote” initiative to get young people to participate in elections. “You’re really counting apples and oranges … the word no longer generates the same level of hostility,” Fishbein said.

Sometimes activism at Rutgers makes national headlines, such as the uproar over the proposed student conference of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement and the pieing of Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky last year. And in Camden, more than 6,000 people – mostly Rutgers students – went to hear controversial filmmaker Michael Moore speak at the Tweeter Center.

Michael Burns, 24, a junior political science major from Marlton, has always considered Rutgers to be an active university. In high school, he enjoyed coming to political events on the Camden campus, such as Rock the Vote. "For being a small campus, [Rutgers-Camden] is very politically active. There is always a cause here. If you want to be involved, it’s very easy to be involved,” says Burns, a member of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group (NJPIRG) at Rutgers-Camden.

As Don Curry points out, this normally activist university has been energized by recent world events and a contentious presidential election. Campuses are swarming with voter registration tables. Last year, a coalition of student groups registered 18,000 voters. This year they are aiming for 20,000 new registrations. RU Voting coordinator Beth Logan just finished voter registration blitz week in time for today’s registration deadline.

Winston Vaughan, an organizer for the Fund for Public Interest Research (FFPIR), heads to Rutgers every few weeks from his New York City office with a team of workers. Activist groups such as Greenpeace, the Human Rights Campaign and the Sierra Club hire the Fund to build membership, build political support and raise money. Vaughan was out on Voorhees Mall one sunny afternoon to take advantage of the election-season electricity with two other fund staff members trying to raise money for Save the Children.

“Rutgers students are totally into these issues,” Vaughan said. “People really care a lot about this stuff.” He said that FFPIR recruits Rutgers students every summer to work in activist jobs, and some become more involved. Each year FFPIR sends members to Washington to lobby Congress on important issues. “It’s a great next step for people who are involved in service already,” Vaughan said.

What will it take for Rutgers to take the top spot on the Mother Jones list? Dickinson offered some advice: “One of the main things that we look for is activism that has a real impact. Not only raising some hell but having a positive result, some outcome. We rate that highly.” But Michaels, of NJPIRG, believes that the smaller efforts make a difference, too. “There’s more to be said for 20 little successes than one big success,” Michaels said. “To me, that’s more what activism is about.”


•Cathy Karmilowicz contributed to this report.

This article was published in the Oct 18, 2004 edition of the Rutgers Focus and is available online at http://urwebsrv.rutgers.edu/focus/article/link/1424/