Where have all the anti-war protests gone?
On the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq last March, a nighttime vigil provided an opportunity for concerned students to gather by candlelight and reflect on a war that was entering its fifth year. The attendees? “It was mostly graduate students and community members,” said Laura Wadden ‘09, citing the noticeably low turnout of Stanford undergraduates. “It’s a conversation we don’t have at Stanford very often.” A number of students and faculty offer similar observations of the undergraduate student body, in regards to the startlingly subdued level of anti-war activism on campus. While the phenomenon is not exclusively attributed to Stanford in particular, nor undergraduates, many suggest a number of theories as to why vehement anti-war protests harkening back to the 1960s are but a distant memory on campus. Mandatory conscription laws are no longer in effect as they were in Vietnam — a fact that students and professors cited as an explanation for the lack of anti-war campus protest
