Sound citizens get out the vote

JOSEPH N. BELL

We are being told by a whole spate of recent studies that the tilt of

American college students to the right is threatening to turn into a

free fall that should scare the daylights out of the Democrats. In

the last five years, for example, the number of stated college

Republicans has almost tripled, student protests of affirmative

action have mushroomed, and, says Brian Anderson, author of “South

Park Conservatives,” in an essay in the Los Angeles Times: “Never has

the right flourished among college kids as it does today.”

All of this reminds me of the years following the Vietnam War. I

started teaching in the English department at UC Irvine in 1966, so I

got the full impact in my classroom of those violent years of campus

protest. But when the war ended, and the military draft was done away

with, the tone and tenor of the student body changed almost

overnight. The strident political involvement and social awareness of

the Vietnam period disappeared like a deflated balloon, replaced by

concerns over advancement of self rather than society. There was

quite suddenly a lot more interest among my students in the stock

market and corporate retirement plans than teaching in the Peace

Corps.

That’s when one of my former students stopped by to report angrily

that she had been traveling other campuses to get signatures on a

petition against a proposed law that would prevent students from

voting at their university homes and found almost complete

disinterest in the subject. I wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine

entitled “Silence on the Campus,” using her experience as a

centerpiece, that got several hundred outraged letters from students

who felt blindsided. It was the first show of involvement in the

outside world I’d seen among them since Vietnam ended.

Although that tide of conservatism receded gradually, partly to be

channeled into fundamentalist Christianity, none of the ferment of

the years of student engagement in civil rights or the 18-year-old

vote or war protest reappeared before I retired 15 years ago. After

that, I was too busy doing missionary work among Newport-Mesa

Republicans to keep in touch with students. So their current alleged

movement to the political right caught me by surprise and set me to

wondering if that was happening on my old campus. And that led me to

social science professor Mark Petracca, a close observer and willing

commentator on the UCI scene.

He had read the same articles that set me on this track and wasn’t

at all sure they were as true generally as the supporting evidence

suggested.

“Sure, there’s a more conservative tilt, but it doesn’t manifest

itself here in any organized way,” he said. “I’m a faculty advisor

for both campus Democrat and Republican clubs, and, between the two

groups, we’re lucky to get 25 people in a room when they meet.

“To me, the larger phenomenon here is that students aren’t much

interested in politics at all. I don’t know why we spend so much time

trying to figure out where our young people are politically when most

of them never vote, anyway.”

So if a presidential election as hyped as the one last November

doesn’t engage our college students, what do they find compelling

these days?

“More and more of our students,” Petracca said, “are getting

involved with organized programs -- especially community service work

-- that takes them off the campus. Things like the Arts’ Bridge, that

carries arts to our public schools, and Global Connection, aimed at

enriching school curricula. This is largely because of the new

emphasis on community service in public schools. Some require it, and

this carries over into college.”

Petracca was a graduate student during the Vietnam period and

remembers campus burn-out after it was over. He says there have been

two identifiable student cycles since that time: political

mobilization, both for and against, during the Reagan presidency, and

a breadth of world events in the late 1980s that stimulated strong

student interest. “Since the early ‘90s,” he said, “I haven’t seen

that same level of interest.”

Similarly, at the other end of the country, the dean of first-year

students at Wellesley College in Massachusetts was quoted recently as

saying that students have become much more worried about choosing the

“right major and boosting their resume with community service. I find

them a lot more reluctant to explore something they haven’t done

before. They’d rather take a safe and tried path.”

So what can we expect from the young people coming out of our

colleges now?

Said Petracca: “That’s what all of these studies are trying to

find out. In my opinion, conservative versus liberal is beside the

point. The politics of young people is likely to reflect the world

view they developed within a specific generation. People who grew up

as New Dealers, for example, mostly remained that way the rest of

their lives. More important than political leanings is the training

they receive to be effective citizens. They are, we must remember,

our social capital.”

I would hope that these new social capitalists would, somewhere

along the line, also learn that the first requirement of effective

citizenship is to vote. I’m sure that John Kerry wishes that might

have been better ingrained in college students.

I wonder, every once in awhile, what became of that frustrated

young woman who sat in my UCI office 30 years ago and vented about

the new generation of students who weren’t enough interested in

protecting their voting rights to sign her petition. I guess I’d

rather not know. It would depress me deeply to learn that she was

shilling for a pharmaceutical house or a tobacco company or an Enron

clone.

On the other hand, I guess it would be enough to know that --

wherever she is -- she votes regularly. At least that’s a place to

start.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.