Northland Peace Studies students at Duluth Federal Building, April 2. Photo: courtesy of Tom Howard-Hastings.

esterday was Good Friday, 1999, and Donna Howard-Hastings and I were up early and on the road to Duluth, MN, to join others in an act of nonviolent opposition to the two-war bombing campaigns being waged by our culturally sensitive Clinton junta. (They began the latest bombing before Passover and Easter, the new definition of culturally sensitive).

Joined by about 65 good folks, we looked around and happily noted that the diversity was not too bad, considering our mostly white region here in the North woods. At least we were doing well age-wise: From white-hairs to orange dread-locks, it looked like a range of 16 to 80.

Fifteen of the young ones were my students from Northland College, some 75 miles to the east. Though three other, much larger, campuses are clustered around the Duluth-Superior area, there were, at most, one or two students from those schools. I had not organized my students; they are self-motivated.

Campus activism is not an automatic thing, as organizers learn to their chagrin. It is a bit like the old dictum of community organizer Saul Alinsky, “Organize the organized”: If those students are already in a group with shared values, they are more likely to participate in whatever worthy event is offered. If they have faculty support, they are more likely yet. And if they are finding the experiences fit not only into their course work and even course requirements for community service, they are that much more likely to give it a try. When they take the leap and make Peace Studies their major on a campus where activism is valued, they show up in solid numbers, having organized themselves. Then they will go ahead and organize their own events, even campaigns.

Many Peace Studies programs stress scholarship almost exclusively. This is just fine, as far as it goes, but it steers students toward a kind of ivory-tower aloofness that strands the student in history. Only by actually experiencing the power and frustration of nonviolence can the student inform the theory with practice.

The flip side, of course, is that the young person familiar with the theory and the history, who has been a part of a vigorous in-class discussion and various simulations, can generally be expected to be the more effective and sophisticated nonviolent actionist. One young fellow unknown to us showed up at the demonstration yesterday and began declaiming on the necessity to get more radical, more resourceful, to use any means “at our disposal.” A good-looking, persuasive and confident fellow, he probably would have cheerfully broken a few plate-glass doors.

My students just looked at him and shook their heads. No thanks. We’ve discussed what happens when we invent ever-more confrontational tactics on an ad hoc basis with no time for discussion, let alone consensus; people get hurt and the public image of nonviolence is trashed for a good long while in many people’s hearts. The young man was reduced to making a bit of a rant in the face of one policeman, who spoke up to all of us, saying, “I don’t know where this one comes from, but I wish you’d tell him that we don’t bust heads in Duluth.” We smiled.

Five women, meanwhile, were occupying the entryway, unmolested and unarrested. Two men had tossed red paint on the granite exterior of the building, kryptonite-locked the center doors and leaned a wooden cross with an effigy of a child against the locked doors. They were ticketed and released.

Next month, two of my students will do internships with Loaves & Fishes, the Catholic Worker community that organizes most of the nonviolent actions in Duluth. This is the kind of institutional support that an activist-oriented Peace Studies program can provide, which gets the best and brightest out in the field, doing the work, making mistakes, discovering their strengths and weaknesses, internalizing both the theories and the competencies we try to teach them back on campus.

Scholar-Activists
Does their scholarship suffer? Not at all, though it is different. My students read much more popular literature and internet pages than they do refereed journals, though those journals are available to the serious academic. They begin to learn how to shake themselves out: Am I heading to grad school or straight into the peace job market?-a phrase that used to be a laugh-getter but is now a serious question for my students, who can examine a jobs board in the hall with more than 50 postings. They choose volunteer and internship experiences based on those tentative general choices. They design minors and emphasis areas and course selections based on, let’s say, a series of job listings they like that all call for good writing and editing skills. Or good computer skills. Or familiarity with indigenous issues, or the natural sciences.

I belong to some professional organizations, including Peace Studies Association, with member professors from across the country, some of whom are directing Peace Studies programs with a large activist component; these are usually the schools that provide the most volunteers to head overseas on peace teams, or who have large cohorts at protests at the School of the Americas (NVA, Jan-Feb.)or landmine manufacturer AlliantTech.

Citizen Inspection
In 1997, before I was teaching at Northland College, Donna and I worked with some of the Peace Studies students to organize the first U.S. citizens’ inspection of a nuclear arsenal facility. A core of those students undertook to design an action that would push the envelope, and they did. As Peace Studies students, they were exposed to a periodical rack in the Peace Studies library that told them the most exciting mass actions were happening in Europe, where the women acquitted of all charges after hamering on a warship helicopter sold to Suharto and bound for East Timor were now organizing citizen inspections of nuclear facilities.

“Let’s do it here,” they said, and they did, working with several other groups and thus bringing almost 100 people to the remote ELF site (the location of the signaling devices that can launch nuclear missile attacks), almost a quarter of whom joined some of the students in the inspection. That kind of hands-on experience leads to advances in the field of nonviolence; those students knew more about the history of nonviolence than did many of the activists who showed up at ELF, yet the students weren’t burdened with ossified ideas of how a nonviolent action must unfold. They invented. Older activists pitched in when the students didn’t see details that years of experience reveal; the students, having been empowered to make basic decisions, didn’t then resent the observations and help from the oldsters.

Where is this happening?
• Michael True, one of the germinal figures in the field, frequently accompanies students to various nonviolent civil resistance actions. He is an Emeritus professor at Assumption College and will be teaching at Columbia, Holy Cross and other places, bringing with him his scholarship and his activism.
• Marv Davidov, founder of the Honeywell Project, a resister and career organizer since his days in the civil rights movement in the Deep South, is an adjunct at St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, whose students are in constant motion, getting arrested at AlliantTech, SOA and elsewhere.
• Siena College in Loudenville, NY, brings in longtime nonviolence trainer George Lakey to conduct training sessions.
• Mark Lance of Georgetown University teaches an Ethics of Nonviolence class.
• Ruth Krall of Goshen College reports that they bring in peacescholar-activist David Cortright of the Fourth Freedom Forum to do a course on nonviolence. Before students went to the School of the Americas vigil last November, more than 50 attended an extended nonviolence training process. Forty of them, members of the campus peace group Pax, went to Georgia; they brought SOA Watch’s Father Roy Bourgeois to campus to speak. Numbers of them camped out on the campus commons to illustrate the massive and very personal problems of refugees, an experience that is informing them and the campus during this current Balkan war. They also run conferences and have made a video, among other activities.
• Chapman’s Peace Studies core requires a student to take Nonviolent Social Change.

Besides the text study in classes such as Theory and Practice of Nonviolence, some schools, like Goshen, offer extended trainings. Last fall, Northland brought in Michael Valliant, a 1992 graduate of our Peace Studies program who went on to a tour with Peace Brigades International in Sri Lanka. He trains PBI volunteers and continues to serve on their board. He did a day-long training, and students were eager for more. They are demanding more such days, and even weekends, and we will bring in Barb Kass, a trainer in Nonviolent Response to Personal Attack. Barb, a former member of Jonah House in Baltimore and a co-founder of Wisconsin’s Anathoth Community brings a lifetime of involvement in nonviolent action to her professional career in the field of domestic violence. The interrelatedness of the theories of nonviolence, in all their nuances, are thus made increasingly available to the Peace Studies student and that student is more active and more valuable to movements for social change.

If you wish to organize on campus, start with a relationship with the students but develop one with the professors too. You’ll find tough sledding without both. Students will listen and then they’ll ask their teacher, who will rarely hesitate to offer an opinion based on history and experience; the more activist the professor, the more generally true this is. Many Peace Studies programs may not be particularly activist-oriented.

But those that are can go a long way toward beefing up local and national involvement and toward producing a new generation of leaders with a depth of understanding informed by a rich sense of history, theory and the personal competencies and experience to bring to the real world of nonviolent social change.

Tom Howard-Hastings can be reached at Northland College, Ashland WI 54806; thastings@wheeler.northland.edu. He is a member of the WRL National Committee and is on parole from a 1996 act of direct disarmament.