Political disinterest harms academic experience
By Melissa Peterson
"Impeach President Clinton NOW!" read the student-made posters. "Impeach the man who destroys our trees!" demanded the banners outside of the student union.
Opposite the Earth Club's protest, a red and black van rounded the street corner. "No on Nine!" the loudspeaker blared, referring to a state measure on gay rights. The van bared statistics and slogans on the issue in bright, eye-catching painted letters.
These two colorful scenes are vivid reminders of my first visit to a large university campus when I was a high school freshman. Until my hunt for colleges actually began, this image remained in my mind as a characteristic trait of any and all institutions of higher education.
Protests and sit-ins are hardly characteristic of our campus. Save our singular jaunt into the land of informed and passionate college students with last spring's Unity Three protest, our small campus remains hidden and uninterested in issues on any scale, whether they be local, regional, national or global.
No, I am not insinuating that the apathetic bug has bitten every Santa Clara student. The infection, however, is nearing epidemic proportions. How many people are aware that a new president just took office in Indonesia this past week, for example? More than that, how many people just read that question and thought: "Why the hell should I care who's running Indonesia?" The simple answer to that question would be that Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world - the more accurate answer would be that ignorance is a slippery slope to an end that most of us came to college to avoid.
Perhaps then it's not so much that Santa Clara students are apathetic to political and social affairs, but rather that they are ignorant to them. The question then becomes: "Is it a detriment to our students and our campus that we are so unaware of the outside world?" I would answer that with a meaty, gloriously middle-of-the-road, yes and no.
The no answer comes out of the realization that a new president taking over in Indonesia will not affect most students.
The yes answer comes from mounds of social security reforms, the United States' waffling over nuclear weapons testing and the possibility that both the tycoon who brought us the Taj Mahal casino (Donald Trump) and the actor responsible for the oh-so-colorful box-office bomb Bulworth (Warren Beatty) will be running in the upcoming presidential election. These are things that either will affect us, or are affecting us already.
The thought that many of us will head into that brave new world so uninformed is worrisome at best.
I wonder sometimes, if we're not interested (we being the educationally well endowed), then who is? Somebody has to be. I hope not to wake up some morning, casually decide to read the newspaper after a sabbatical from the world of the well informed, and find that I now belong to a territory of China. Possibly even worse, to discover that yes indeed Iraq has been dispersing anthrax bacteria into our water supplies for months now, so watch out.
While most of us could not escape the news of national takeover, the point stands. World events, and more importantly the steps that lead to those events, do affect our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Further, note that we all chose to attend a university that requires we study math, science, religion, history - all things that, for most of us, we will never really "need" to know. We study these things because as scholars, we recognize the importance of educating ourselves on things that do not always strike us as immediate and imperative topics for our survival.So while I don't suggest we break out the poster paint and stake out the Benson fountain area, I do say that as students we need to work a little harder to stay up on the global scene. Come on people, wake up and smell the nuclear weapons in North Korea, the bloodshed in Chechnya and the defense weapons struggles with Russia.
Melissa Peterson is a sophomore undeclared major.