COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: War Protests: General
College Not Combat
ELIZABETH WRIGLEY, International Socialist Review
September–October 2005
WITH
SUPPORT for Bush’s occupation of Iraq at an all-time low,
reflected in plummeting rates of military enlistment, the antiwar
movement has begun to reemerge. At the head of this revival has been a
counter-recruitment movement that rapidly developed nationwide last
year, particularly in schools, where young people resent being targeted
to carry out an occupation they oppose. College students have kicked
military recruiters off campuses around the country, while high school
students, parents, and teachers’ unions are leading campaigns
against recruiters in their schools.
This fall, the movement that began to take shape over the last year is
taking steps to cohere itself into a more effective force to challenge
military recruitment and the war. Two grassroots initiatives in
particular show the potential for building a powerful movement
organized around the theme College Not Combat.
San Francisco takes on recruiters
On November 9, voters in San Francisco will have the opportunity to
vote for the following resolution against military recruitment in the
city’s schools:
Resolved, that the people of San Francisco oppose U.S. military
recruiters using public school, college and university facilities to
recruit young people into the armed forces. Furthermore, San Francisco
should oppose the military’s “economic draft” by
investigating means by which to fund and grant scholarships for college
and job training to low-income students so they are not economically
compelled to join the military.
The resolution, known as the College Not Combat (CNC) initiative, was
placed on the November election ballot in San Francisco after activists
collected over 15,000 petition signatures—5,000 more than the
legal requirement—in an effort to put the city on record calling
for military recruiters out of our schools. Alongside teachers and
veterans, parents petitioned with their children. This all-volunteer
force was able to exceed its petitioning goals and secure ballot access
in part because, according to activists’ estimates, about 80
percent of those approached signed the petition. In the words of CNC
organizer Ragina Johnson, “It gives us the power to say the city
of San Francisco is in favor of students and teachers and parents
kicking recruiters off campus.”
That’s a message that organizers hope to send very powerfully in
the November election, where they believe the resolution will pass by a
wide margin. Last year 63 percent of San Francisco voters approved
Proposition N, which called on the federal government to “bring
the troops safely home now.”
The CNC resolution is symbolic: It expresses public opposition to
recruitment without forcing San Francisco’s government to take
action to ban recruiters, which would result in a loss of federal
education funding under the No Child Left Behind Act and Solomon
Amendment. But it has already galvanized opponents of the war by
providing a way they can express their opposition.
The campaign has received significant media attention, including an
Associated Press article picked up by newspapers around the country. It
earned the endorsement of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, whose
editorial argued, “activists are rightly moving to target
military recruitment as a way not only to save the lives of potential
recruits but to push for an end to the war.”
In addition to bringing a counter-recruitment message to people across
California and beyond, the CNC campaign has brought together a number
of activists and organizations. The campaign is endorsed by more than
forty organizations and individuals, ranging from the Free Palestine
Alliance to the San Francisco Labor Council. The CNC’s
eleven-member steering committee reflects the wide range of groups
campaigning for the resolution, including the International Socialist
Organization, National Lawyers Guild, Oakland Green Party (represented
on the steering committee by Aimee Allison, herself a conscientious
objector from the first Gulf War), United Educators of San Francisco,
and Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star Families for Peace co-founder who
spent August camped outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas.
The next step is to build a public campaign leading up to the election
to secure as many votes for the College Not Combat resolution as
possible, beginning on the first day of classes at San Francisco high
schools. Two big opportunities at the end of September will help to
consolidate the campaign and bring in newer activists, who may become
involved in organizing support for the resolution in the critical weeks
before the election. On September 21, CNC will co-sponsor a San
Francisco stop of the national speaking tour of the antiwar British
Member of Parliament George Galloway, hosted by ISR, the Center for
Economic Research and Social Change, and the New Press. And campaigners
will also help to organize the San Francisco version of a College Not
Combat contingent on September 24. Events like these can help bring
others disgusted by recruitment for this occupation into a movement
against it, while the ballot resolution offers a chance for a concrete
victory that can raise the antiwar movement’s confidence about
what we can achieve.
A national mobilization for College Not Combat
On September 24, in the first national antiwar demonstration in over a
year in Washington, D.C., students, teachers, parents, and community
members will march alongside one another in a College Not Combat
contingent.
The Campus Antiwar Network initiated the contingent to bring together
everyone opposing military recruitment—most of whom are
organizing in small groups in relative isolation from one
another—and to help bring new activists to the September 24
demonstration by connecting it to widespread anger at recruitment. The
contingent has garnered over fifty endorsements. The nearly twenty
sponsors planning to mobilize for the contingent now include Educators
to Stop the War, which organized an 850-person antiwar conference in
March; Coney Island Avenue Project, a South Asian immigrant rights
group challenging detentions and deportations; and the Louisiana
Activist Network, sponsors of a Peace Train that will begin in New
Orleans and pick up activists across the South before ending at the
march in Washington.
By giving a national voice to the fight against recruitment, the
College Not Combat contingent is also helping to build the antiwar
movement locally. In New York, activists with the New York City
Counter-Recruitment Campaign are launching a campaign against military
recruiters in the City University New York (CUNY) system this fall.
This campaign, which is being spearheaded by CUNY students in the
Campus Antiwar Network and professors in Educators to Stop the War,
hopes to use the College Not Combat contingent and a CUNY petition
campaign to bring together activists from a wide range of CUNY schools,
creating opportunities for new campus antiwar coalitions to form and
schools to unite in bigger actions.
Initiatives like these will be able to take on national scope at the On
the Frontlines conference at the University of California-Berkeley on
October 22–23, jointly sponsored by the Campus Antiwar Network
and Military Out of Our Schools–Bay Area. Coming out of the
September 24 protest and a new wave of antiwar organizing this fall,
the conference presents an opportunity for these experiences to be
generalized into a more coherent national College Not Combat movement,
with those targeted by recruiters at its forefront.
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of