The Year of the Cop-Out

The year of the student political worker will have to be remembered as the year of the student copout: though some young people are effectively involved as the election campaigns come down to the now-or-next-time stage, those performing in the fall are a small fraction of the many who made promises in the spring.

Almost all the evidence on the political attitudes of students denies the notion that they are more radical or more active than the rest of the population. In fact, they vote in even smaller percentages than the sometimes apathetic general electorate, and when they do go to the polls, they vote for parties in almost exactly the same proportions as their elders.

Such conventional wisdom is eroded by the attention paid student radicals and is sometimes swept away entirely by dramatic events like the outpourings of campus protest following the U.S. intervention in Cambodia and the Kent and Jackson State student killings last spring. With the demonstrations came fervent pledges from thousands of students to work this fall for liberal and antiwar congressional candidates. The most heavily publicized and widely considered proposal was adopted by Princeton University, which rescheduled its semesters to give students two weeks off before the election for campaigning.

Close to Moribund. Now the wave of indignation has receded and the familiar facts of student political inactivism are left standing like rocks. Students are simply not working as they said they would. Many local chapters of the Movement for a New Congress, the Princeton-headquartered national group through which most students planned to participate, are close to moribund. In the Boston area, with some of the nation's most prestigious schools and several peace candidates, the M.N.C. rarely answers its phone.

The Princeton Plan won but minimal acceptance. Of the nation's 2,500 colleges and universities, about 25 have adopted it, and not all of those are sus pending classes for the full two weeks. At Columbia University, for instance, students will get only two days off for campaign work.

There is other evidence of student apathy. Since last month, the University of Detroit has been offering a workshop, led by practicing politicians of both parties, to teach realistic campaign techniques; only 69 of the university's almost 9,000 students enrolled. Faculties have been no more responsive. The Universities National Anti-War Fund, which once spoke about raising millions of dollars for peace candidates by getting teachers to contribute a single day's pay, has collected only $225,000.

More than Before. The movement for student involvement within the system has not been a total failure, however, and while there is no precise way of measuring its impact, there will be some. It will be felt unevenly, as students flock to prominent liberal candidates like Senator Charles Goodell and Representative Allard Lowenstein in New York and Senatorial Candidate Adlai Stevenson III in Illinois. Despite the drop in unrealistic enthusiasm, there seems little doubt that more students will be involved in party politics than ever before. At Cornell University, for instance, Government Professor Peter Sharfman says that without the recess perhaps 50 students would have worked in campaigns. With it, he estimates, 500 will. At Princeton, about 950 students --a fifth of the student body--are expected to be working for candidates.

The nature of that work may give the students an impact beyond their numbers. The committed ones spent the summer analyzing their performance in the primaries in order to correct their mistakes. The M.N.C. volunteers will go out with a mandate to fit into the candidate's plans and do legwork that may not be glamorous but is important. Example: by delivering a "mailing" house-to-house in a congressional district, students can save a candidate postage amounting to thousands of dollars --money to be used for another crucial campaign need. For that reason, few candidates are spurning the limited student help they are being offered.

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