From Vietnam to Iraq

Former student body president Keith Parker had barely stepped into office when he started receiving death threats.\nIt was May 1970. Nixon had just given the order to invade Cambodia, and four students at Kent State had been shot after protesting the war. Parker and other student leaders knew the community response to these events would manifest in some sort of large assembly. \nStudent leaders had two responsibilities -- making sure the protest happened and making sure it happened safely. They did not want a repeat of Kent State, nor did they want to put Parker in any sort of danger. \nMike King, student body vice president at the time, said he and Parker talked about calling the whole thing off because of the threats, but then realized they "couldn't just back down."\nSoon enough, word got around that there was going to be a protest for peace in Dunn Meadow, and 10,000 people from the Bloomington community covered the field.\n"The protest was so large, it was unprecedented," King said. "Students and faculty surrounded Keith during the march, so he was protected."\nKing said they had originally planned to march through town, but thought it better to stay in a smaller radius because of the amount of people.\nIU student protesters marched themselves right into the history books. From chaining up the administration building to forming picket lines outside classrooms, students on the IU Bloomington campus knew how to make their position known.\n"It was certainly the most active place in Indiana," Professor Glen Gass said, who was still in high school in Greencastle, Ind., when things started to pick up in the '60s. "It was the center of counter-culture."\nAmidst tuition hikes, a controversial war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement, IU developed a reputation for being one of the most active campuses in the country.\n"The issues back in the '60s and '70s had the potential to affect everybody," former student body president Paul Helmke said. "More and more people were being drafted." \nHelmke points to the draft as one of the reasons that students might have been more vocal during the Vietnam conflict. \nCurrent IU Student Association Vice President Judd Arnold said the draft is probably the primary reason why students today are not protesting in the same numbers they once were.\n"I know a lot of people in my Dad's generation that were in college to avoid the war," Arnold said. \nHelmke also said that many of the issues surrounding the war in Iraq are seen as affecting only a small group of people, and thus do not draw the same kind of reaction.\nDuring the Vietnam conflict, student leaders were highly involved in the opposition movement. They submitted "demands" to the University, asking, among other things, that it denounce American involvement in Southeast Asia. They also asked the University to commit to minority recruitment in order to make the racial makeup of the student body more representative of the racial makeup of Indiana.\nThe University did not submit to the demands, although it did make a commitment to minority recruitment. To this day, it is working to attract minority students, but the percentages still do not reflect Indiana population.\nWhereas current IUSA leaders recently declined to take a position on the war, Helmke believes that student government should not be afraid to take a position during times of conflict, he said.\n"I think it is appropriate to take positions on things like that," Helmke said. "Sometimes the only way to help influence people is to join with others in speaking out … it doesn't need to be a unanimous position."\nHe said when he was student body president, students often held more than one position when they got together for large rallies or meetings. \nArnold said that if the student position on the war was as apparent now as it was during Vietnam, IUSA would have no problem coming up with a resolution about the war. There is a large difference between the 500 signatures collected by the Coalition to Oppose the War in Iraq and the 10,000 students that protested in Dunn Meadow after the invasion of Cambodia. \n"It is a very divided campus," he said. "We think it is best that students voice their opinions through their own means."\nAnd with thousands of protesters willing to march, Parker said the activism in Bloomington during Vietnam was not limited to one group of people.\n"There was a wide cross-section of students and people in Bloomington, not just radical students or hippies," Parker said. \nBut Gass notes that even within groups that would normally protest the war, the lines are blurred when it comes to deciding on the war in Iraq.\n"I think it is a lot less black and white today," he said. "We were attacked, and that changes everything."\nParker said he agrees the threat of terrorism definitely sets this war apart from Vietnam.\n"We did not have to worry about Vietnamese terrorists," he said.\nAnother major difference between the anti-war protests today and those that happened more than 30 years ago is the time frame in which the protests took place. The demonstrations Parker participated in occurred at the height of the movement, which reached its peak after the United States had been involved with the conflict for more than five years.\n"Here you have enormous opposition to the war before it began," Parker said. \nInternational protest against the war also sets this peace movement apart from the Vietnam protests. Today, millions of people across the globe have flooded the streets of major cities to express their opposition to the Bush administration's decision to use force in Iraq.\nGass said the current administration reminds him of the administration during Vietnam.\n"We have another president who doesn't care if he fights a war with or without the people," he said.\nBut even though IU students are not protesting like they used to, there are still some, like the students who make up the Coalition to Oppose the War in Iraq, that are working to keep the fire of opposition alive.\n"I think in general, if you live in a democracy, part of that is taking an active role in the decisions that are being made in your name," COWI member Lauren Taylor said. "It is really important that people on this campus ... be vocal about how they feel about the war"