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U.S. scholars make anti-war voices on campus as students keep silence |
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09:50, July 06, 2007 |
Student protests at campuses across the United States have been rare as the four-year-old Iraq war drags on, while some scholars have begun speaking out and conducting studies within their own disciplines to make anti-war voices.
The lack of protest can be attributed in part to a change in character, as nowadays students are more serious about getting a degree, entering the working world and making money, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.
And unlike the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the conflict in Iraq does not play out against a backdrop of civil rights protests and counterculture rebellion.
Meanwhile, the government has been skillful in limiting the fallout at home by controlling visual images of the war dead and declining to release information on the number of American or Iraqi casualties, leaving student activists to find other issues easier to embrace.
But some academics are concluding that they must speak out.
According to the newspaper, Dan Lowenstein, a note neurological professor at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), recently helped stage an anti-war teach-in on the campus, where UCSF physicians described the psychological damage to children in war zones and the high percentage of brain injuries suffered by American soldiers in Iraq.
"We must listen to our conscience and speak out," Lowenstein told hundreds of doctors and medical students at the gathering.
Calling the conflict in Iraq "the silent war," the professor said the absence of a draft and the lack of televised images of battlefield body bags or coffins coming home have helped keep protests to a minimum.
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