Most people will give you the usual reasons for going to college: a higher income, learning a profession, developing a broader education and becoming a cultured person.
But I will give you an additional reason. Colleges and universities are places of political activity, to which you can get involved if you so desire. When I was a senior in high school I had already started to protest the Vietnam War. When I reached Temple University I found ample opportunity to join protests on campus agains the war. In the spring of 1970 I attended the first Earth Day celebration on Temple's campus. It was a much more politically enlightening event that it is today.

We were just beginning to learn about the threats to the environment. Soon I joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) the largest of the antiwar groups of the time. We protested not only the war but also against racism in society.

Then we all experience the Big Chill of the mid-1970's when not much was happening protest-wise. The Vietnam War ended. The civil rights movement had quieted down. SDS was defunct.

I returned to Temple in 1978 as a graduate student. At that time there was a budding
environmental movement that was especially concerned with the dangers of nuclear power. I immediately got involved with the Students Against Nuclear Development (SAND), a local Temple University group and began to educate ourselves and others about the problems of nuclear power generation. We protested as well. Soon a new group was formed, the Temple Coalition for Peace and Justice. I was in this group longer than any other. We met every week, and got involved in protesting apartheid in South Africa, and U.S. support for the Contra army in Nicaragua.

I got my Ph.D. in 1988 and shortly left Temple University with fond memories of my days of student activism. But the story does not end there. With the start of the Iraq War there has been a revival of the Students for a Democratic Society. The New SDS in Philadelphia meets once a week. We just had a first demonstration, against the Iraq War, at Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, 2007 during the official celebrate they have every year there out in front of the building. We were the only group protesting the war. It was my first SDS protest in 35 years! Twenty eight years of teaching American government courses gave me the power to give one of the best stump speeches of my life on behalf of the group with a command of the statistics on racism and sexism, in a call and response from the audience format.
Technically I am not a member of the new SDS but of the new Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), a group for people who are no longer students.

I invite you to check out the new SDS at www.studentsforademocraticsoci ety.org

Learn more about this author, Donald Busky.
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