By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 12, 1999; Page C01

It was a glorious spring day on the University of Maryland's College Park campus -- warm in the sun, cool in the shade -- and a handful of folks were taking in a baseball game between the Terps and Howard University.

Students Jeff Thompson and John Botwright were there to plow through some business homework and catch a little hardball, not to talk about Kosovo, a conflict half a world away. But, amid the tink of aluminum baseball bats, it turns out that the NATO bombing campaign is very much on the minds of these two students -- and many more across the country -- even if few have been moved to object, approve or even understand what's going on.

"They're our age," says Thompson, 21, of the U.S. soldiers in the Balkans. He is a crew-cut senior majoring in logistics, well read in international affairs and a sthas thus far kept even tiny Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio -- which has a reputation for lefty activism -- on the sidelines. During the '60s, Antioch supplied students for nearly every protest demonstration about anything, it seemed. Today, though the campus yearns to do something, it is stuck in stasis.

"The general feeling here is no one is really quite sure," says Seamus Holman, 20, a journalism junior. "On the one hand, it's ridiculous to try to create peace by bombing the heck out of these people. On the other hand, is it really appropriate for us to sit idly by and not care at all?"

Holman says there have been three campus meetings since the bombing began two weeks ago. He's attended all three, which have drawn about 30 to 40 people, most of them non-students. Holman contributes Balkans Web site addresses to an Antioch student e-mail listserve, and he says the online discussion has been fairly vigorous. And, he adds, the conflict has created an admittedly distant, but worrisome, possibility for college students: a military draft.

"Just to have financial aid, if you're an 18- to 25-year-old male, you have to be registered" for the draft, Holman says. "That's a lingering question." The fact that there is no draft likely contributes to the lack of student activism; there's no reason to burn your draft card.

Each year, Mother Jones magazine ranks its "Top 10 Activist Schools" -- campuses noted for significant acts of student political activity. Duke University topped the 1998 list, for student protests against the university's alliance with Nike and that company's alleged overseas worker violations. They were known as the "sweatshop" protests.

On the topic of Kosovo, however, the Durham, N.C., campus is quiet, aside from one group soliciting donations for Kosovar refugees, students there report.

At the University of Texas in Austin, No. 3 on Mother Jones's list, there is an Anti-War Committee, which has staged regular protests on the state capitol steps over the past year -- beginning with the Iraq embargo and segueing into the NATO bombing -- but they are a clutch of perhaps 50 students and community members at a university of 48,000 students.

"This is 1999, not 1969, which doesn't mean [activism] can't happen or won't happen," says Bob Jensen, an associate professor of journalism and a member of the Anti-War Committee (and a card-carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World -- the Wobblies). "A lot of people see [students] as apathetic. My sense is that it's not apathy but cynicism about what can be done. We have a culture that encourages people to be depoliticized.

"We are trained to be consumers, not citizens," Jensen says, warning that he is on the verge of launching into a "six-hour lecture."

It's the same scene at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (No. 4 in Mother Jones), known as a pacifist, activist campus.

Dan Alter, editor in chief of the Badger Herald, the daily student paper, says his campus has seen frequent protests decrying the U.S. bombing of Iraq as well as the NATO action in the Balkans. Also, he says, his newspaper's editorial board is strongly split on the campaign, as student editors wrestle to decide what position the paper will take in its unsigned editorials.

But he wonders just how broad or deep the student dissent -- or even interest -- runs.

"I sort of don't agree with the activist label we've been branded with," says Alter, 22, a political science senior. "I see the same 25 people at every rally all the time."

Recently, his uncle -- who is a CBS news editor in New York -- asked him why college students aren't more riled up about Kosovo. He couldn't give his uncle a solid answer.

"I think a large part of it boils down to [the fact that] this conflict, or whatever you want to call it, isn't attractive enough for TV, at least not for people in my age group," Alter says, recalling the daily gee-whiz Pentagon briefings during Desert Storm that wowed reporters with video footage of allied missiles pinpointing Iraqi targets. "There is an idea that atrocities are going on, but it's so far removed from anything they could fathom in their everyday lives, people don't realize how bad it is over there, including me."

Alter could be describing the mood on the Maryland campus, as well. Students walk to and from class, and overheard conversations sound typically collegiate:

"I hate a professor who gives an F for 50 percent . . . "

" . . . and then, you have to say, 'cosine R . . . ' "

In the stands at the baseball game, Karyn Weiss concurs that this conflict is less mediagenic. She compares it with the Persian Gulf War, fought when she was in middle school.

"Every day in Global Studies class, we'd watch the war on TV," says Weiss, 21, a business senior. "There was bigger hype for that war."

Things have been quiet at all area colleges.

At Georgetown University, training ground for politicians and diplomats, students -- though not oblivious to the refugees' suffering -- tend to treat the Balkans conflict as an intellectual geopolitical exercise, says one student.

"People are talking about it in a very academic way," says Shaun Tandon, 21, an international relations and history senior. "That might be a characteristic of Washington schools." At George Washington University, one student theorizes the lack of activism at her school is a consequence of students being more "city-focused," eyeing internships on the Hill and so forth. At Howard, another student speculates that undergrads there are more interested in "identity politics," such as black and gay issues.

Mark Lance is an associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown and director of the justice and peace program. He says he's seen little visible evidence of student activism during the NATO airstrikes on Serbia, and, like Tandon, suspects some of that may have to do with the nature of Georgetown itself.

"Lots of kids are very driven here, and are planning on high-end careers," he says. "That changes a bit what the college experience is like. I was at a state university in the '70s and was a musician and later a philosopher," which meant he had time to be activist.

Or it could be about generational style, Lance speculates. He notes that student volunteerism at his school is greater now than it was in the '60s. He says students there have held the school accountable to its Jesuit principles of humanitarianism, but in a different way than their parents might have.

He recalls Georgetown's own sweatshop protest in February, when 27 students held a four-day sit-in in the president's office (during which, it should be noted, the students whispered to each other so as not to disturb the office workers). The university's response was to send the dean of students and a public relations staffer to negotiate.

"If that had happened in 1960, they'd have sent the police in there and dragged them all out," Lance says. "You're less likely to see dramatic militant protests on campuses these days. But that doesn't mean students aren't doing things."