Sit-ins. Anti-war protests. Civil rights rallies. The invention of the teach-in. These are just part of the legacy of student activism at the University of Michigan during the 1960s. The steps of the Michigan Union served as the birthplace of the Peace Corps in 1960, and at spring commencement in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson announced his “Great Society” reforms to fight poverty and racial inequality. Except for the University of California at Berkeley, no college campus possesses as strong a connection to the radical activism that characterized the Swinging Sixties as the University of Michigan.

Flash forward to today, where students across the country are routinely thought to be “apathetic.” Even when University students mobilized in 2008 to elect the first black president of the United States, commentators seized on the idea that students seemed passionate about public policy for the first time in decades. On the surface, this would appear to be the case. When was the last time students shut down a University administrative building in the name of racial and gender equality, or rioted en masse to demand the unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. military from its wars abroad?

But no matter how many people think students just don’t care anymore, the experts — those who lived through the so-called height of college activism in the 1960s — vehemently disagree with this assessment, saying student activism is just as alive today, if not more so.

“There’s much more activity now,” said Alan Haber, the first president of the radical '60s activist group, Students for a Democratic Society, and a University student activist in the '50s and '60s. “Many more students are involved, many more organizations, many more issues, much more intelligence-wise.”

Haber isn’t alone in this opinion. This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of SDS, a group that came to symbolize student activism in the United States. Many of the most prominent activists from the '60s, however, believe that today the student movement for change is bigger, more capable and more successful than it was half a century ago, and would rather look toward the future than idealize the past.

RETURN OF THE RADICALS

Haber has been fighting for a peaceful, prosperous and equal society for 55 years. He claims that such a society won’t happen unless people listen to what each other have to say and learn from it.

Haber started listening to what others were saying when he was a freshman at the University in 1954. At that time, scarcely a trace of political debate existed on campus. The socialist and workers’ rights movements — which had flourished in the wake of World War I and experienced a short-lived resurgence after World War II — were all but gone. The culprit? McCarthyism. Being a radical meant being accused of disloyalty to the U.S. government, and people with ideas outside the norm had to shut up or risk losing their jobs and legal rights.

“After (World War II), Michigan was very hot, and then McCarthyism came and it just closed down,” Haber said. “When I became a student in 1954, there was no political activity (or) public organization on campus. Everybody was afraid.”

The University, for its part, was all too willing to let undesirable opinions fade from campus life.

“Every speaker on campus had to be approved by a faculty group that this person was not subversive,” Haber said.

Getting rid of the approval committee would eventually become one of Haber’s priorities. But in the fall of 1954, Haber was just a University freshman who skipped class to attend his first demonstration — more out of curiosity than conviction.

“I probably didn’t know it was a demonstration, because why would I have known that this was called that?” Haber recalled. “So in a way, it was different times.”

A group of mostly graduate students was protesting the University’s decision to fire three faculty members who had refused to sign loyalty oaths. Haber became involved with this group, which included members with socialist and communist tendencies. Eventually, Haber and his friends found a faculty advisor and started a political issues club on campus. Though the club remained discussion-based for the first few years, the University was once again, slowly but surely, becoming a place where students could challenge accepted ideas.

“I witnessed the coming-into-consciousness of activism, from very quiet to quite active,” Haber said.

What was happening at the University of Michigan was also slowly taking shape on campuses nationwide. Bob Zellner, the first white southern field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student group that fought for racial equality, remembers the emerging energy of the time.

“We were just coming out of what they call the silent '50s, and everybody was getting involved,” Zellner said. “It was a mass movement.