Where Have All the Protests Gone?

That's gone now.

"I've been to meetings for political clubs and they never seem to have any momentum," said Robert Hoyer, an NYU junior who was standing outside the library, wearing a pair of headphones. "I know people who really care about what's happening in the world and are trying to get something off the ground, but it's hard for me -- and a lot of students -- to see a way of making a contribution that means anything."

What happen to the street-fighting man? The answer has to start with the draft, or the lack of it.

Because it was personal and nearly unavoidable, the draft lent the same urgency to activism then as hunger and homelessness did during the Great Depression, when unemployed workers marched on the Ford Motor Co. and thousands of World War I vets camped in Washington demanding bonus pay. The draft felt as immediate and potentially deadly as racial discrimination did to those who suffered it and took to the streets to fight it. It was the thing that drove masses of angry kids to Chicago, where they made a shambles of the Democratic National Convention in 1968 -- a far cry from the relative handfuls of Iraq war protesters who were kept on the periphery of the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn., this summer.

But the draft didn't just terrify and galvanize students. It forced them to be curious about the world and serious in a way that isn't required today.

"Our friends were getting killed in Vietnam, and any day you could get a letter from the government saying 'Time to go,' " said author and anthropologist David Givens, who teaches at Gonzaga University. "So for survival, we read and we talked. And the people who got up to speak at demonstrations, they were highly literate, they were great orators, they were writers. They had to be articulate. Everyone did."

That's missing today, Givens said. "It's not that kids are stupider. They're just not as interested in the world. They don't read as widely. They don't have to. You'd be amazed at how many college students on their MySpace page say that X-Men comics are their favorite books."

Some students sound every bit as underwhelmed by the level of intellectual curiosity on campus. Rachael McMillan, a senior at Columbia University, worked for two years with the Columbia College Democrats and found the experience pretty unsatisfying. But at least she tried.

"Most college students just don't feel like they have a vested interest in what is happening today," she said. "I hate to say it, but a lot of my peers calculate the opportunity cost of coordinating with others -- or planning a sit-in or a walkout or just some protest -- against the urge to write a paper, get an A and go to Harvard Law School."

McMillan isn't exempting herself from this charge. She quit the CCD last year after spending five hours squabbling with the Socialist Club about what to put in a news release. It all seemed tragically disorganized to her. But she knows what's happening in the world beyond Columbia, which is more than she can say for a lot of her classmates.

"No one was really curious about Iran until the president of the country came to speak at our campus," she said. "Then it was like, 'Oh, yeah. Iran.' A lot of my friends get all their political news from 'The Daily Show,' or from Perez Hilton, who does more political commentary than you'd think. We spend more time padding our résumés than trying to stay informed."

The draft, McMillan believes, would transform Columbia. But to explain the relative calm of college life today by focusing solely on the draft would be a mistake. It runs deeper than that, said Todd Gitlin, a Columbia professor of journalism.