CHALK TALK : Scrawled sidewalk messages serve as an expression of spirit for CSUN student activism and protest.

The handwriting is on the wall, an old phrase warns. But at Cal State Northridge last week, the handwriting was on the sidewalk--in chalk.

Students walking to classes near the Student Union slowed to read messages that appeared at this new forum for campus protest, known as a chalk-in.

And on the eighth day we bulldozed it.

There are no winners in a nuclear war.

10% of Honduras’s pine forests on the savannas were destroyed in the 1986 U.S.-Honduras joint maneuvers.

Written in colored chalk and charcoal, and adorned with drawings of peace symbols and the Earth, the messages covered a 100-yard, L-shaped stretch of sidewalk that has been approved for the purpose by CSUN authorities.

Mutters and Nods

Some students muttered objections to what they read. Others walked off nodding in assent. An angry young man on a skateboard scuffed the lettering as much as possible with the skateboard’s wheels.

On a lawn a few yards away, two dozen sorority sisters cheered for a fraternity that was engaged in a softball game.

“That used to be my house,” said Lisa Sherwood, 21, her hands covered with red and blue chalk dust. No longer a Delta Delta Delta sister, Sherwood now belongs to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the group that initiated organized chalking on campus.

“They think I’m really blowing it,” Sherwood said of the sorority members, “and I think it’s too bad they feel so mainstreamed by television and everything else that they cheer at ballgames and think all they’re supposed to care about is boys.”

Sherwood sees herself as part of an awakening of social activism at CSUN. Others, however, say that the chalkers and their concerns are a tiny part of campus life.

There is even disagreement on the chalk-ins themselves.

“This is a new concept,” said Sgt. Harry Edwards, a 15-year member of the Campus Police Department. “No one’s done it before.”

David Rodriguez, a lecturer in the Chicano Studies Department and CISPES faculty adviser, said that organized chalk-ins are new, but a precedent exists.

“I was a grad student here in the early ‘70s, and there was chalking then,” he recalled. “There’s always been some, but it was done on a very spontaneous and sporadic level.”

Vandalism Complaint

Last year, however, CISPES members stepped up the occasional chalking, drawing outlines of bodies outside the campus bookstore to represent people killed by rightist Central American death squads. Acting on a student’s complaint of vandalism, campus police questioned and released two CISPES members.

The incident led to development of a chalking policy, worked out by representatives of the CSUN administration, student government and protest groups. The policy limits chalking to the sidewalks across Lindley Avenue from the Student Union. It requires that a CSUN-approved group obtain a permit from the student activities office, although anyone is permitted to chalk on the designated day once the permit is issued. The group holding the permit promises to clean the sidewalks after three days.

Taking part in the chalk-in April 27 were CISPES, Earthwatch--a campus environmental group--and the anti-nuclear Alliance for Survival. The theme was ecology. Most messages criticized the cutting of Latin American rain forests for cattle ranches, U.S. military policies in Central America and U.S. Forest Service actions in this country.

However, a few passers-by scrawled messages of their own, including “Get religion out of politics.” A chalk-in earlier this year had human rights as a theme.

Activists called the forum a good means of expression, saying students pay more attention to messages chalked on sidewalks than to posters on bulletin boards or flyers handed out at tables.

“This opens communication, which is good because it’s frustrating on campus,” said chalker Garrett Hoffman, 20, of the Alliance for Survival. “You get the door shut in your face. People are apathetic or they think the United States is always good and everyone else is the problem.”

Hoffman, who plans to transfer to Brandford University in Great Britain to major in peace studies, said most students at CSUN are indifferent to human suffering.

People who stopped to read chalk-in messages had a variety of opinions. Senior Sandie Scalmanini says she believes the level of student activism has risen in recent years.

“On our campus, it used to be that everyone went to school and no one got involved in anything,” she said. “No one had anything to say about anything. That’s changing, which is good.”

Scalmanini said she approves of chalk-ins but hopes participating groups realize that some students work in less visible ways. She cited her part in a free health-check fair on campus that day as an example.

Maryn McGhee, 23, a member of the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority, struck a similar theme.

“We have our own ways of helping people,” she said. “We do lots of philanthropy.”

Jess Barrios, 22, was visibly upset by sidewalk messages critical of U.S. intervention in Central America. Barrios said his family fled communist Cuba when he was a year old.

“A lot of what they put out here is wrong,” he said of the slogans. “They don’t understand that we had our homeland taken from us, and it’s happening now in Central America.” The United States should “impose whatever it takes” to wrest Nicaragua from the Sandinistas, he said.

“My house is 100% Republican,” said Barrios, a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, “and they agree with my view.”

Barrios said he would never take part in a chalk-in but that the practice should be permitted.

Scott Brecker, 23, was one of the few students to criticize both the messages of chalkers and chalk-ins themselves. Ecological concerns are a waste of time, he said, because under capitalism “you can’t go on without destroying a lot of forests.”

He scoffed at chalking as a means of expression.

“What does this do? A lot of people walk on it.”

Elise Bedsworth, 27, a chalker and Earthwatch member who attended the University of Alaska in Anchorage, said she finds a high degree of complacency at CSUN.

“I press the point that with issues like deforestation, it’s not just in Third World countries, it’s in your own back yard,” she said. “I tell people to go take a hike sometime and see.”

Sherwood, the sorority sister turned chalker, said that the desire of students to conform socially is a major obstacle to the activist movement. Protest was more acceptable during the anti-war era of the 1960s and ‘70s, she said.

“I know what it’s like to be afraid,” she said. “I know what it’s like to worry people will think you’re weird. But in the house we had pansy breakfasts and exchanges with the fraternities. I would work so hard and feel so empty afterward. Now I feel I’m working for something important.”

Charlie Wilken has a similar outlook. Wilken, 33, was one of the CISPES members detained by campus police for chalking outside the bookstore. He helped negotiate the current chalk-in policy.

“I had a job as a machinist for 10 years and went back to school to become a biology teacher instead,” he said. “I was working in the defense industry and for a long time I said, ‘I’m just making one dumb little part. I’m not really responsible.’ But finally I decided I had to change my life.”

Wilken became interested in Central America after talking to an aunt who visited Nicaragua. Wilken said he has been to Nicaragua twice, staying a total of five months. The chalk-ins, he believes, have been a success.

“It makes an impression,” he said, surveying a stretch of sidewalk that was as brightly colored as a newspaper’s Sunday comics.

Wilken had only one regret about the compromise chalking policy.

“We’re sorry we agreed to the cleanup part,” he said. “After doing all this, we really don’t want to turn around and wash it away.”