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Passing the Torch

or plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

by Lenny Siegel, May 2024

The most exciting part of the May 3-5, 2024 Stanford Activists’ Reunion was the interaction between participants who had been active at Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s and current activists who are organizing against the fossil-fuel industry and more immediately, the Israeli assault on Gaza. Students served on Reunion panels, and older activists visited the protest encampment in White Plaza.

In October 2023, the Sit-In to Stop Genocide set up tents in White Plaza, at times attracting hundreds of supporters. They left in February after the university administration banned overnight protests and agreed to meet with the protestors. But that didn’t end the protests. In February eighteen students were charged with disrupting the Family Week-End welcome session in Memorial Auditorium with anti-genocide signs and chants. In late April, as similar encampments swept the nation’s college campuses, activists resurrected their anti-genocide encampment in front of the campus bookstore. Like their counterparts elsewhere, students continue to insist that Stanford divest from companies providing military support to Israel.

The current campus activists sought to learn from the experiences of us older folks. While we praised their organizing and commitment, we were also happy to share lessons from our eras. Below is an enhanced summary of what I personally offered over the course of the week-end.

I explained that the Stanford Administration has moved the goalposts defining the boundaries of acceptable campus protest. Based upon personal experience, I said It used to be that one had to disrupt a CIA recruiter, barge into a meeting of the university’s Board of Trustees, or break into Encina Hall to attract the attention of the university’s repressive apparatus. Now they can cite you simply for camping.

Similar to my personal experience, Stanford still cites protestors for activities for which they were not present. Furthermore, Stanford does not follow due process, threatening students with severe penalties if they ask for quasi-judicial hearings.

I re-told how we used Stanford’s repressive acts to widen support for the Movement. Many students who are not tuned in to what is happening across the planet do get upset when their classmates and housemates are treated unfairly. Often that engages them long enough to explore the issues that triggered the protest. Two 1960s examples of this strategy were the successful May, 1968 Old Union sit-in (see Old Union Sit-In1) and the February, 1969 Stanford 29 trial, the spectacle of which forced members of the Board of Trustees to agree to a public meeting with activist representatives (see January 14 Trustee Meeting2).

As current activists face the threat of academic penalties and/or arrest, some fear the premature end to their intended careers. While each person has to make decisions about the risks that they’re willing to take, I pointed out that the reunion cohort is made up of people who were sanctioned by Stanford or faced arrest and/or jail time, yet still led productive lives as journalists, lawyers, professors, organizers, and government officials. However, not too many became tech billionaires.

I’ve said this before: When one applies to Stanford, you think it’s an educational institution with a football team and two basketball teams. In fact, it’s a corporation with more land than the neighboring city of Mountain View, huge investments, and thousands of employees. It contains a major hospital complex, an upscale shopping center, and the world’s prototype industrial/research park.

As a corporation, Stanford is run by a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees. See 1967 We Accuse Posters3 and Strike Against the Stanford Empire Poster4. In the name of the Trustees, the administration invents its own rules and quasi-judicial processes. Any campaign to influence university policy needs to acknowledge and educate the Stanford community about that power structure. While the current board doesn’t have the miliitary contractor executives that we had back in the 60s, the university remains undemocratic.

Student-led movements need to gradually build and demonstrate majoirty support on campus for their proposals and demands. In 1969, when the April Third Movement had a complex set of demands to end secret war research and control the Stanford Research Institute, we won a massive vote of the student body. In response, the administration commissioned a poll. We won that too. See A3M: University Polls5. Even in undemocratic institutions, demonstrating majority support is a valuable strategy. When we were ignored, that simply proved our point about the unrepresentativeness of the Trustess.

Back in the day, we had not yet invented the Internet or Social Media. In some ways, those makes it easier to mobilize people in a hurry. But it shouldn’t substitute for the hard, continuing work of organizing and education. (And I’m not saying that today’s activists are not doing this hard work.) We used militant actions to generate interest in our demands. People would say, Your militancy is turning people off, so they won’t listen. Why did you do it? So we took the time to explain.

We used sit-ins, such as the nine-day April, 1969 occupation of the Applied Electronics Laboratory, as base areas. We didn’t barricade ourselves into buildings. We locked them open and invited people in. We printed 3/4 million sheets of expropriated paper in AEL’s print shop, and volunteers from the sit-in fanned out every morning to distribute newsletters and pamphlets to residential houses and academic departments all over campus. (With today’s digital tools, we probably would have done things differently.) At other times, we would convene popcorn parties in dorm lounges, inviting students to discuss our issues.

Never expecting our actions to quickly change university policy, we tried to create virtuous cycles. Our militant actions generated interest in our educational materials and programs—based upon a wealth of research — and those educational activities brought people to our subsequent actions.

Finally, we projected an incisive sense of humor. We produced guerilla theater skits and plays, such as Alice in ROTC-Land, which several reunion participants performed at the May 2024 reunion. See Alice in ROTC-Land6. A couple of us later sold buttons saying, Go Reds—Smash State. Football fans thought they were about the Rose Bowl, while activists saw it as a call for revolution.

Many of us who were active in the 60s and 70s remain politically active, but we are proud and energized to see a new generation grabbing the torch of political struggle at Stanford.

References

1. Old Union Sit-In. Link

2. January 14 Trustee Meeting. Link

3. 1967: We Accuse Posters. Link

4. 1970: Strike Against the Stanford Empire Poster. Link

5. A3M: University Polls. Link

6. Alice in ROTC-Land. Link