How Hippie is your Department?
In Ruckus [Vol. 7, Iss. 2, October 2003]

One university. A sample of three-thousand eight-hundred forty-five students. One war. One anti-war resolution. Fourteen different disciplines, from mathematics to drama. What will it be?

What was done: On February the 12th of this year, the UW’s Graduate Professional Student Senate (GPSS) officially voted to pass a resolution condemning US military action in Iraq. With this, the UW became one of almost 150 universities nationwide to have passed such resolutions. To push for further support, e-mails were sent out to students majoring in fourteen select disciplines, urging them to sign the UW Anti-war Resolution on-line (http://www.campus4peace.net/uwaw/supportres.html). Mathematics, Communication, American Ethnic Studies, Geography, combined Languages, Art, English, Education, Environmental Sciences, History, Drama, Anthropology, Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) and Classics were all hit. More e-mails would have been sent, but the boys at Campus Computing got wind of the operation and threatened to discontinue certain peoples’ MyUW accounts. So the thing was stopped.

How useful are the results? It’s important to realize the limitations of this study. Just because 10.4% of English and Education students signed the resolution, does not mean that only 10.4% of these students were against the war. What it does mean, however, is that 10.4% of these students cared about the matter enough to go on-line and spend time signing a resolution. So the results are useful in that they allow us to compare relative anti-war sentiment at the UW.

What the results were: Check out the charts. An average of 9.6% of students actively responded to the anti-war cry. Most studies had a response pretty close to this, with History, Drama, Anthropology and CHID distinctly towards the higher end. Students in Geography and American Ethnic Studies, on the other hand, weren’t too hot on signing up.

But there were outliers, too. Only 5.7% of Communication students signed, while mathematicians gave by far the lowest response: only 3.3%. At the other end of the spectrum were the students of Classics. Almost a third (32.4%) of the 37 students sampled came out against the war.

Ruckus analysis: Active anti-war sentiment on campus was, on the whole, low. This might come as a surprise, considering the common view of Seattle as a ‘liberal’ and ‘activist’ hangout. The vast majority of students seemed to have little time for extra-mural activities such as signing petitions. It’s not that students lacked an opinion (I mean, everyone has an opinion, right?). That leaves three options: (i) They didn’t care; (ii) They felt they couldn’t make a difference, anyway; or (iii) They were pro-war or undecided. Passivity was a nationwide phenomenon. Consider the fact that during most international days of protest more people walked out in Barcelona, Spain than in the entire US combined! Some protests saw 1.3 million people on the streets of Barcelona – a city with only 1.5 million citizens.

Conclusion: “The sixties”, as one piece of hate-mail I got said, “are not coming back”. Maybe true, until some moron in charge decides to impose the draft again. Ten-thousand years of civilization. Ten-thousand years of the same mistakes. The only thing that seems to have changed, thanks to technology, is the number of deaths for each screw-up. Descensus Averno facilis est.

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