U. community reflects on past, current activism

University students with a passion to change the world or, at least, the New Brunswick community, have been the source of years of picket signs, marches, rallies and protests on the Banks.

“The tradition of student dissent is deeply woven into the fabric of Rutgers,” said University President Richard L. McCormick. “It’s been this way for decades, if not centuries.”

Student protests have been responsible for some of the most important innovations in the University’s history, and the tradition of dissent is vital to University history, McCormick said.

On the Voorhees Mall of the College Avenue campus today, one might find the remnants of a “tent city,” as student activists clean up after a weeklong demonstration.

Tent State University, held annually for the past decade to advocate for higher education and to serve as a platform to voice any student issues, is one of the lasting traditional events held to remind other students of their potential as vehicles of change.

But according to a professor who had witnessed years of public student dissent in New Brunswick, especially during the years of the Vietnam War, the activist scene is not what it used to be.

“Today’s students may take too much for granted,” said Michael Rockland, a professor in the Department of American Studies. “They may not realize how hard people worked back then to bring meaningful change.”

Rockland, who was involved with changing the voting age from 21 to 18, said the low turnout rate among young voters is also very disappointing.

“I thought that [the voting age of 21] was outrageous,” Rockland said. “Here you [had] boys being drafted to go off to fight a stupid war where they might very well get killed or maimed, but they couldn’t vote.”

Rockland, who has voted every year since he turned 21, said students do not have to do too much to vote, especially since they can at least send in an absentee ballot.

“One of the greatest disappointments to me is that the group of Americans that least vote are the 18- to 21-year-olds — the very people for whom I fought to have the vote,” Rockland said.

Throughout the last half-century, societal changes were made on the local and national spectrum, in addition to the lowering of the voting age. At the University, these changes ranged from making classes co-educational to desegregating the student population.

University students rallied in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to a range of causes — from the war in Vietnam, gender segregation, racism and minority exclusion in higher education, to the general quality of higher education. Since then, students have come together to fight for the causes they believe in.

“It was one revolution after the other, all of which I think had good reason to [occur],” Rockland said.

But once during a protest against the Vietnam War, students showed their opposition by throwing Molotov cocktails at the ROTC building.

“A lot of my job was trying to say to students, ‘Hey there’s the First Amendment, you can say anything you want to at anytime,’” said Rockland, who served as an assistant dean for three years at the University. “‘But please don’t throw Molotov cocktails.’”

But more than any other group of people, students in this country brought the Vietnam War to an end, Rockland said.

“They affected absolutely everything,” Rockland said of the University’s student activists.

He recounted an instance during the time after the civil rights movement, when members of the University’s Black Student Congress had waited in the dining hall line, loaded their trays with food and then threw their full trays in the air, Rockland said.

“It all landed on the floor,” he said. “You saw food squashed and broken plates, because they were so angry that there were so few black students — minority students in general — and so few minority faculty.”

Similar demonstrations caught the administration’s attention at the time, McCormick said.

“African-American students all over the campuses in New Brunswick rightly hauled the University’s attention to the small number of African-American students and faculty, and essentially, the non-representation of African-Americans in the curriculum,” McCormick said. “They were right about all those things and dramatic changes followed.”

The University, which had resisted integration in the 1960s, now prides in its enormous diversity, said history professor Norman Markowitz.

“Real progress was made,” Rockland said. “The faculty is much more diverse. In a way, the University became much more representative of the American people than it was back then.”

But some student activists, like outgoing Rutgers University Student Assembly president Matt Cordeiro, believe that students still push to make change in the community.

“Students can have a really big impact,” said Cordeiro, a School of Arts and Sciences senior. “I like to think that I’ve had a really big impact.”

Cordeiro said student activism last year contributed to the lowest tuition increase in a decade.

Walk Into Action, a rally organized by New Jersey United Students last spring, attracted more than 300 attendees, including undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, Academy bus drivers and members of the American Association of Undergraduate Professors. The protest targeted the state’s higher education funding crisis.

But organizing students for a cause does take time and relies on the methods of the organizer, he said.

Students might simply be busy, Cordeiro said, citing University coursework and the many opportunities for extracurricular participation.

“We had a very similar rally [in spring 2010], but it didn’t get nearly as many people,” Cordeiro said.

In addition to Walk Into Action, students at the University have rallied for a number of causes in recent years.

Students participated in a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender “die-in” to fight for tolerance in fall 2010; several “Occupy New Brunswick” protests against corporate greed through the past academic year; and a silent rally last month to reflect on the death of Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old who was shot and killed by a community watchman.

Members of the University community from New Brunswick to Camden rallied on multiple occasions this semester against the potential Rowan University and Rutgers-Camden merger and this past March, Cordeiro and other RUSA members were among 36 students arrested in Washington, D.C. during a student debt protest.

This week, participants of the 10th annual Tent State University reminded students that voicing their concerns is possible through the right platforms and that activism is still a fixture within the University community.