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It is in the breaking news sidebar!
Posted on 04/12/2003 1:02:36 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
As they gathered downtown earlier this week to protest the war in Iraq, a motley group of students and activists busily readied the tricks of their trade.
A couple of men gingerly laid on the sidewalk two cardboard "caskets" topped with plastic flowers and the bloodied heads and body parts of baby dolls.
A man wearing a white Cheshire cat mask hung a severed fake head of Vice President Dick Cheney, with a "666" scribbled on its forehead and plastic sword speared into the top.
A young woman expertly dabbed white and black makeup on a young man's face to evoke an image of a ghoulish skeleton.
But the leader of the pack simply donned his professor's gown.
"This is a mock funeral for the innocent victims of the war against Iraq, and this was the closest thing I had to a minister's gown," University of Houston professor Bob Buzzanco quipped about the black robe with royal blue felt stripes that UH had given him to wear at graduation ceremonies.
The attire seemed fitting. As student activism continues to wane at many of America's campuses, professors such as Buzzanco increasingly find themselves playing dual roles of teachers and political organizers.
"If you turn back the clock 30 years, you find that the students were doing the organizing, but now they tend to not be so interested in that," said Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education and editor of New Criterion magazine.
"Many professors are reliving their adolescence of the 1960s, when they were opposing the Vietnam War and advocating sexual liberation."
Buzzanco -- a burly 6-foot-2 former high school linebacker who became a self-described "radical socialist" while growing up in heavily unionized northeast Ohio -- simultaneously relishes and laments the parts. Although he attended college in the late 1970s, his consciousness, he said, was heavily shaped by the anti-Vietnam War movement.
"A lot of students remain passive or very conservative," he said. "Here I am, a professor, Xeroxing fliers and putting up posters and organizing things. But it's kind of satisfying when students tell me they learned something."
Like most Southern universities, Texas campuses historically have not been politically active. At UH, the level of activism is further constrained because 90 percent of the students commute.
After arriving at UH in 1995, Buzzanco said, "I decided I would do whatever I could to invigorate things."
He helped organize campus and community demonstrations and became a frequent guest on a bellicose radio show on KPFT-Pacifica Radio, a stridently leftist network based in Berkeley, Calif.
But not until 1999 did Buzzanco begin to take his role as campus agitator "seriously," he said.
"I essentially put my own world on hold for two years or so,"he said. "We were out organizing or speaking four or five nights a week. It was probably like another full-time job."
Buzzanco said he frequently advised how to set up student organizations, helped them find room for speakers, organized teach-ins and did much of the legwork for campus and community demonstrations. Recently, he has organized weekly antiwar rallies in front of the downtown headquarters of Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., which Cheney used to head.
Salima Perhomamed, 23, a senior with a 3-year old son and full-time job, showed up at last week's rally with a sign that said, "Drop Bush not Bombs." She warmly hugged Buzzanco.
"Having people like Buzzanco around is very important," she said. "They do all the crapwork for you. All you have to do is show up."
Even at the University of Texas, with its more primarily residential student body and richer history of activism, some professors have felt the need to serve as catalysts in recent years.
Journalism professor Robert Jensen, who has taught at UT since 1992, became politically active after the United States bombed Iraq in 1998.
"It was clear the UT campus was not a hotbed of political activity at that point," he said. "That's partly what was motivating me."
Jensen organized and built a network of student and community activists. But his work took an unexpected turn after Sept. 11. Three days later, Jensen published a letter in the Chronicle saying the terrorist acts were "no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism" committed by the United States.
Soon after, UT President Larry Faulkner published a letter in the Chronicle denouncing Jensen as "a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy," making Jensen an object of national derision but a hero to the growing antiwar movement.
Jensen said he is now a highly sought writer and speaker, and devotes most of his spare time to these activities. Earlier this year, he emceed an antiwar demonstration at the state Capitol that drew 10,000 people, Austin's largest demonstration since the Vietnam era.
Student activism has grown on the campus in the last several years, he said, but students deserve all the credit.
Buzzanco and Jensen, who are friends, said they express their views in their classrooms but don't push them on students.
"The day after the bombing in Iraq started," Jensen recalled, "I said to my class, `A lot of you know I'm involved in antiwar activism. I don't want to bring my politics into it, but it occurs to me a lot of you might have questions, and I don't see why we can't spend some time talking about the war.' We had a very good discussion. Several students have told me, `I'm so glad you're talking about the war.' "
But Austin Kinghorn, a UT junior who chairs the Young Conservatives of Texas student organization, has a different view.
"I had the good misfortune of taking one of Jensen's classes, and it's the main reason I'm not a journalism major anymore," Kinghorn said. "He used a class after Sept. 11 as an opportunity to denounce America as a terrorist nation and cycle through an imaginary laundry list of evils Americans have perpetrated. It's a shame he's tenured, because he should be fired."
Earlier this week, Buzzanco brought a guest speaker who strongly denounced Israel to a colleague's Middle East history class. Buzzanco passed out fliers he prepared for his mock funeral in front of Brown & Root, and, as he left the class, he told the students, "See you all at the mock funeral. Dress in black and paint your faces black."
"I guess that wasn't the coolest thing I've ever done," Buzzanco said when a reporter asked if he thought that was appropriate.
Who in the heck wrote this garbage?! By activism they must only mean the uber-liberals who march around proclaiming the joys of Lenin and Stalin. I see plenty of student activity at any college campus I visit.
Heres a thought...maybe people are waking up...! This article fails completely to recognize anything as a political movement that is not Liberal or Socialist...or as is usually the case both.
"I guess that wasn't the coolest thing I've ever done," Buzzanco said when a reporter asked if he thought that was appropriate.
Lord forgive us for letting fools like this have any position in the "Education" of our youth and myself.
Schools of journalism, government and education need to be refitted with educators not activists.
Another good Irish name heard from...
LINKS at site listing activist groups influencing children.
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