"The administrators did not call the police. The students and the administration negotiated and they reached an agreement," Perkins says.

At UMass-Amherst in February, students who occupied the New Africa House for six days to protest a racial attack on campus told reporters, "We're not revolutionaries. We're reasonable people with reasonable demands who intend to be taken seriously."

Officials at UMass agreed to take action against students who commit racial violence, while the school's chancellor, Joseph Duffey, sent the protesters a basket of fruit.

United We Stand?

The surge in student activism has prompted many students to work to unify activist forces across the country. A national student conference held at Rutgers University last February was attended by more than 700 students from 20 colleges and universities. Many students came to the conference with hopes of creating a national network of activists at the two-day convention.

"It was the most incredible meeting I've ever seen," says Jay Hodos '89, the only Harvard student who attended the conference. "So many people who are committed to change were brought together. It was amazing."

While disagreements among the various factions brought an end to hopes for a national coalition of student activists, one splinter group established the Northeast Student Action Network (NSAN). NSAN provides student activists at New England-area schools with a means of finding out what is happening at other campuses in their area, Perkins says.

NSAN sponsored a conference and rally in Boston last month and is planning a convention of 40 schools at UVM this fall. "We want to create some lasting structure for the regional network," says Perkins.

Although the techniques of student activism have changed, some of the problems that plagued the movement 20 years ago have not. Many activists in the 1960s "appeared to have no stomach for hard, tedious, daily organizing, no respect for and little contact with the people in whose name they claimed to be acting," wrote Thelwell in The Village Voice last March. Some students see similar problems with activism in the 1980s.

"There are still a lot of the same problems in the movement," says Hodos. "There is fragmentation within the movement. There is a problem with minority representation."

Both of these problems disrupted the Rutgers Conference, which left students without the national network that many had come to create. Power struggles divided the conference, and many of the minority students at the conference said not enough effort was made to ensure a fair representation of minorities, says Ritter. The minority students withdrew from the forum, stating in a letter that they did not want to be part of the organization under such unfair conditions.

"At that point, the whole place went chaotic," says Hodos. "People got really confused. We realized we weren't going to have a national organization this year."

Some students say the problem is a tendency for the white upper-class students to control the movement, leaving minorities with the feeling that they have no place in the very movement that professes to help their cause.

"White radicals cannot speak for everyone anymore," says Ritter. "We cannot have a movement until everyone is brought into the picture."

Divided We Fall?