THE BUDDING Yuppie met the brooding activist Thursday at Northwestern University.
In an era when surveys show that college students think more about their wallets than world affairs, five Northwestern students were arrested at a placement office for participating in a 1960s style protest against job recruitment by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Since October, groups of students have tried to disrupt visits of CIA recruiters at campuses throughout the Midwest and Northeast, including the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota and Tufts and Brown Universities. The protesters contend that the secretive government agency has no business recruiting on a college campus.
The Northwestern protest, like those at the other universities, marked a clash of student styles:
FOURTEEN STUDENTS interviewed by the CIA recruiter got a chance at a job, a 1980s badge of success; two students may have jeopardized their Northwestern enrollment by protesting militarism, a 1960s moral badge.
For Mitchell Smith, who faces suspension for protesting, speaking out against the CIA was more important than protecting his academic status.
”It`s not a risk. These are necessary actions that have to be taken,”
said Smith, a 19-year-old sophomore from Rye, N.Y. ”These people (the CIA)
represent a threat to humanity. Many students in this era are more concerned with their own individual interests than concerning themselves with broader human concerns.”
School officials said about 30 students sought an interview with the CIA. After a lottery, only 14 were interviewed.
Those applicants will join about 200,000 others from across the country seeking intelligence agency jobs ranging from engineers to political scientists to linguists to computer scientists, said CIA spokeswoman Patti Volz in Washington.
”I CAN SEE (the protesters`) point, but I disagree with them that the CIA is totally wrong,” said a senior in economics who interviewed for a job as a political analyst. ”I can see a place for the CIA, even if I don`t agree with everything they do.”
An estimated 50 students took part in the daylong picketing against CIA recruiting and staged a mock trial with the CIA as defendant.
Eight members of the International Committee Against Racism staged a sit- in in the placement office on the second floor of Scott Hall, 601 University Pl., locking arms until Evanston police arrested four students on charges of trespassing. Two of the four also were charged with resisting arrest stemming from a brief scuffle with police.
A fifth student was arrested later for trespassing and resisting arrest, leading to a complaint by a fellow student that campus police used unnecessary force in throwing the student to the ground.
FOR SMITH and junior Rebecca Huntman, 20, of St. Louis, the stakes could be high. A university spokesman said charges against Smith and Huntman could lead to their dismissal from school for at least one year.
Both were charged Thursday with trespassing, and Smith faces an additional charge of resisting arrest.
Smith and Huntman were placed on disciplinary probation Tuesday for a Nov. 1 sit-in at a university dean`s office to protest the employment of engineering Professor Arthur Butz, who has written a controversial book contending that the Nazi Holocaust was a hoax.
That probation order included a condition that another major violation of university regulations would lead to their suspension for at least one academic year.
THE PROTESTERS, echoing complaints of peers who have staged similar demonstrations on other campuses, charge that by allowing CIA recruiters on campus, a university is sanctioning controversial CIA activities. These include, most recently, the mining of Nicaraguan harbors and the preparation of a manual that advised the ”selective use of violence” to ”neutralize”
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Nicaraguan officials.
”We don`t want to associate Northwestern with the CIA,” said Wally Hettle, a student member of the International Socialist Organization, one of four groups that staged the protests. ”Someone here may choose to be interviewed by the CIA, but its victims in Central America don`t choose to be victims.”
Others on the campus of nearly 7,000 undergraduates were more concerned with having a shot at a CIA job or sleeping late.
When 15 protesters chanted anti-CIA slogans outside Scott Hall at 8 a.m. Thursday, they were met with shouts from a nearby dormitory to quiet down. Campus police said they also got phone calls from students complaining about the noise.
NORTHWESTERN Placement Director Victor Lindquist, who said the CIA has recruited at Northwestern for more than a decade, defended the university`s decision to allow the agency on campus.
”It`s recognized as a legitimate arm of the U.S.,” Lindquist said.
”The university has to be an environment where any and all ideas can be discussed.”
Students who have staged protests at other campuses disagree.
”This is not a free-speech issue,” said John Roosa, 22, a recent graduate of Tufts University, in Boston, who was among 35 students in a human chain to block a CIA recruiter from entering a campus building in October.
”They do not have a right to recruit here,” Roosa said. ”We might as well let the Mafia on campus to do recruiting. If some group came to campus and identified itself as a terror squad with connections to right-wing fascists, I think the university would not let that group on campus.”
YET, ROOSA conceded that most Tufts students do not share his views. A Tufts spokesman said that a student judiciary panel considering sanctions against the protesters found that the students had no right to disrupt the visit but that the action did not warrant punishment.
At Brown University in Providence, R.I., a similar attempt to disrupt a CIA recruiter`s speech in November resulted in disciplinary action against 56 students. A committee of faculty deans ordered notations placed on the students` transcripts.
No disciplinary action was taken against about 100 students at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, when they chased three CIA recruiters to their cars in November.
However, the protesters rarely have prevented recruiters from meeting interested students, Volz said. In some cases, interviews are rescheduled; at Tufts, applicants were invited to the agency`s office in downtown Boston.
”We really don`t care about these protests, to tell you the truth,”
Volz said. ”It really doesn`t happen that often, and we`ve been through all this before, during the Vietnam era.”