THERE ARE two reasons students should participate in tonight's Take Back the Night march on the Downtown Mall. One: We ought to demand an end to violence against women. And two: This is one of the few times we can see a bunch of University students so adamant about something.
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It's unfortunate that the University is not known for having especially vibrant student activists. We may be blessed with students who are in line to be tomorrow's top research scientists, professors and corporate executives. But too often we forget that we can have as much sway today being college students as we do in our future careers.
That's why Take Back the Night is such a good idea. The demonstration gets the Charlottesville community involved in a valid concern - violence against women. More importantly, it flexes the vocal chords of University students and unearths the power of student opinion. At full force, these opinions can be deafening and inspiring. It is then that we realize how a student voice can draw attention to a social injustice and at times be used to overturn political decisions. It would be awesome if this ability were utilized more to rile up the community.
The problem is, we don't use our voices enough. Other than the annual Take Back the Night event, University students don't congregate in huge numbers to protest anything. The last University student demonstration in memory was 1999's Living Wage Campaign, a protest to raise Charlottesville workers' minimum wage because student rallies here have been few and far between. Compared to college campuses like University of Califorinia-Berkeley, which has earned a reputation for its radical student body, University students are docile.
We are unique compared to the rest of the nation's college campuses. A record 46 percent of college freshmen joined public protests in 1999, the largest percentage since UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute began tracking the trend in 1966. Many of those public student demonstrations have succeeded in enforcing changes at their universities, regions and states. But that trend is not to be seen here.
At the University of Oregon, voted last year as Mother Jones magazine's top student activist school, students demonstrated how much sway a united student body can exert on college and state policy. When students at Oregon discovered that collegiate apparel's $2.5 billionindustry was being fueled by sweatshop labor, months of protests broke out - including mock sweatshop demonstrations where students hunched over sewing machines for 14-hour shifts.
Undergraduates at Oregon and across the nation demanded their colleges quit the Fair Labor Association - an industry-backed watchdog that supported such abusive practices. The college eventually did.
The University community could be having this same kind of impact. As a group, students could be one of the most influential bastions of influence and change. But right now we aren't.
Much of it is due to the fact that we simply don't know what's going on outside our little world. If prompted with the words "China" and "spy plane," most of us wouldn't even know what those terms referred to, much less be able to elaborate about last week's detainment of American crew members after their spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet. After four years of college, it would not be surprising to hear alumni reflect that they lost four years as they earned degrees and had a good time. Granted, these are significant priorities as a student - but once we become ignorant to the outside world, we soon forget the impact we could be making on society.
The organizers of Take Back the Night should be applauded for encouraging students to organize for a worthwhile cause. But after Thursday's march, we are not finished.
We are college students, a group that cannot and should not simply be reduced to the bookworms, partygoers or poor and unemployed intellectuals of society. We have the most time on our hands and the fewest attachments in terms of family and employment commitments. This is the best time to stamp our foot down and take action.
Extreme measures are not necessary. We do not have to take over a dean's office to show our strength, or to storm the State Capitol - as Florida A&M students did two years ago. University students need only to remind themselves that when we have valid reasons to rally, we should stretch our activism muscles and exercise our First Amendment freedom. If we don't, we can watch our influence as students begin to atrophy and wither away.
(Juliana Chan is a Cavalier Daily viewpoint writer.)
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