The drafting of soldiers to fight in Vietnam brought the hollowing pain of death and loss of brothers, friends and classmates to thousands of Syracuse University students in 1970.

“You picked them up and you took them!” said Robert McClure, a young professor at the time of the protests, recounting the anger students felt toward the draft.

“To get widespread social protest, the pain has to be meaningful and deep and widespread. And these were students all across the country, and the issues involved were all across the country, and the protests were all across the country – real demonstrable pain,” he said.

Forty years ago this pain led to nationwide protests across college campuses, sometimes leading to deadly altercations between protesters and authorities. Although the United States is fighting two wars today, mass demonstrations against the war are absent from college campuses, partly because there is no draft. But students’ access to instant communication makes the potential for demonstration greater.

“There was a vigorous, bitter divide in the general electorate over civil rights to start with and then the war, which was based on a draft that ended up touching the lives of millions,” said McClure, a political science professor.

The Vietnam War, which resulted in the death of approximately 60,000 American soldiers, was much more intrusive and significant in the lives of most college students than today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fought by a volunteer army, McClure said.

McClure cited a piece of public opinion research that concluded the public’s opposition to war is directly correlated to the number of dead soldiers. Accordingly, student opposition to the war has been limited given the much smaller number of deaths in today’s wars, he said. Combined casualties for Iraq and Afghanistan stood at 5,442 as of April 30, in comparison to the 60,000 American deaths during Vietnam, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s website.

Student protests of the scale and intensity of those in 1970 are likely to occur only if students feel the same intensity of pain from something, he said.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, director of the Middle Eastern studies department, was outspoken against the invasion of Iraq, holding forums in 2002 and 2003 to discuss the reasons and implications for going to war. The student activism was nowhere close to the activism of 1970, he said.

Students participated in several local protests alongside Syracuse residents in 2002 and 2003. Participation at these protests never involved more than 70 SU students, according to articles from The Daily Orange.

The lack of activism against the war in Iraq was the result of a widespread sense of helplessness and frustration still present in America after Sept. 11, Boroujerdi said.

“This was a country that was feeling some existential angst as a result of terrorism,” he said. “I think there was a sense of complacency, a feeling this was going to happen no matter what.”

By 2003 the war in Afghanistan had also been more successful than anticipated, so students and the general public assumed Iraq would play out in the same manner, quickly and with few casualties, Boroujerdi said.

But the relatively small amount of student activism in response to the invasion of Iraq does not reflect a permanent decrease in activism on university campuses, he said. Boroujerdi pointed to the protests in Iran last summer as examples of how educated youth continue to rally in enormous groups when they are angry and disenfranchised from the government.

“Campuses still happen to be the hotbeds of protest in other regions, and it’s natural. You have a numerical concentration of people, and you have intellectual concentration,” he said.

The charismatic leadership of SU students, such as David Ifshin, student body president and the leader of the Vietnam protests at SU, might be present in today’s student body, said Larry Elin, a professor of television, radio and film. But students today have not taken up a cause to rally around in numbers comparable to 1970.

Ifshin’s daughter, Chloe Ifshin, a junior television, radio and film major at SU, grew up hearing about her father’s devotion to ending the war in Vietnam. Ifshin died of cancer in 1996. Chloe said she wished she had lived in an era when she could fight for something greater than herself.

“I’m passionate about the environment and about human rights. But there’s a difference between knowledge and action,” Chloe said. “I think what could make me get up is if something was directly going to impact my little world, which is kind of sad. I don’t think I could have fought for other people the way my dad did. Those were his friends being drafted. Those were his frat brothers.”

Chloe said she thinks the relationship between her and her parents’ generations also makes today’s students less active because protesting and social movements were always something she associated with their past and not her own life.

“We think of our parents’ generation of being really revolutionary and active,” she said. “These movements are something we associate with our parents. It’s not as much of a rebellious act for us. It applies to feminism as well. People fought for it, and we think of it as a personal choice not to continue fighting – but it’s really apathy.”

Chloe used the protests against this year’s commencement speaker, Jamie Dimon, to demonstrate how students will protest only if the issue is something they can actually change.

“There was a definitive goal, “We want a different commencement speaker,” and that was appealing to people,” she said. “If we don’t feel we’re capable of change, then we don’t try.”

Elin pointed to a major difference between American society of 1970 and of today. There was a vast generational gap between students of the 1970s and their parents, a divide that is not as apparent today, Elin said.

The students protesting the war did not see the justification for bombing and invading an impoverished, small Southeast Asian country, Elin said. Students were looking critically at the beliefs of American policy the generation before them had taken for granted.

“We thought we could see the evildoings of our own country in a way that the older generation couldn’t or refused to see,” Elin said.

Were SU students to take up a cause en masse, the potential for quick and enormous gatherings would vastly expand due to the advent of social media and cell phones. Students today have a greater ability to form movements than students did in the 1970s, Elin said. Now is a greater time than ever to form youth movements around the world, he said.

Elin, a freshman at SU during the Vietnam protests, said simply being around people who were involved was infectious.

“I was as dumb as a brick when I got here as to what was out there in the world,” Elin said. “Then I was just being bombarded with these new stimuli, people and ideas.”

Although social media provides the space and method for communication between protesters, Student Association President Jon Barnhart said he does not think a Facebook group or event page is an effective method for inciting outrage or passion. He referenced the quick response of students on Facebook to the cancellation of MayFest in October, which had 5,000 members in 24 hours, he said.

“Seeing someone else’s energy is what builds your own,” Barnhart said. “It’s very difficult to get excited over a Facebook group.”

Although SA led many of the student protests during the 1970s, Barnhart said it would take many students from a very diverse set of backgrounds coming to him about an issue for SA to lead something as serious as a student protest.

But Barnhart believes there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed through activism, such as race relations, women’s rights and the new immigration bill passed in Arizona that makes it legal for police to check the papers of anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant, he said.

“In a lot of ways I feel we’ve backtracked,” he said. “We need to make sure these rights are here to stay and they’re progressing. But what do we have showing we support them – a Facebook group?”

In spite of this, the Syracuse campus continues to be a significant source of civic activism in more discreet ways.

Pam Heintz, the associate vice president for engagement and director of the Center for Public and Community Service, oversees much of the student volunteerism on campus.

The number of students volunteering for academic causes around SU was about 7,000 last year, and the number of community co-curricular services was 2,500, totaling 9,500, Heintz said. The number of hours put into community service totaled approximately 700,000, she said.

“The students we see are very committed to the work they’re doing and I believe, for many of them, this is their way of making the world a better place,” she said. “And I believe that for some students, depending on what the next big issue is, (they) will find themselves becoming activists.”

This generation of college students has shown the most sustained commitment to stay active in volunteer work, Heintz said. She also thinks students today are more aware of the social injustices, having grown up with the legacy of movements like civil rights, women’s rights and the Vietnam protests, she said.

Ultimately, McClure said, students today and the students 40 years ago are more similar than they are different. Young people will always be the most passionate about whatever cause or direction society is taking at the moment, he said, because they have no memory of issues before then.

“So could it happen here that students would become organized and active?” he said. “Of course. No one would have likely predicted in 1960 that students would close the campus down in 1970. It’s the good and scary part of college students. They’re just sitting around waiting for a good cause to raise hell about, if the right conditions present themselves.”

Published on May 2, 2010 at 12:00 pm