With the surge in Internet startups and investment banking, some politically-minded students say their peers think the way to change the world is with their pocketbooks, not their voices.
"'Have people gone from Washington to Wall Street?' is the big question," says Marc Stad '01, president of the College Democrats.
Winthrop Professor of History Stephen A. Thernstrom says graduates' growing prosperity makes them less concerned with political fights.
"There is a sense of entitlement and privilege that comes through," Thernstrom says.
Empirical evidence backs up the perception that students are less involved. In a poll released in March by Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, 55 percent of those surveyed said the campaign was "boring" and only 25 percent termed it "exciting."
Whatever the reason, in many ways students at Harvard have stopped acting on their ideologies.
Harvard is still a liberal place--in a Crimson poll conducted earlier this year, almost half of Harvard students identified themselves as liberal, a third as moderate and a sixth as conservative.
But other studies suggest students now express their convictions through public service rather than voting or political organizing.
According to a survey in early May by the Institute of Politics (IOP), Harvard students who want change say community service is the only feasible method.
Of the 300 students polled, 78 percent had performed service in the past year, whereas only 38.7 percent had been a part of a political organization. Less than 25 percent had volunteered for a political campaign.
"[Students] aren't against politics in the abstract--they just think it is more difficult to get involved in politics," said Trevor D. Dryer '00-'02, who co-chaired the committee that developed the survey. "Community service is easier and you see more tangible results."
Observers propose various theories to account for the change.
"It's the after-effects of an entire shift in the culture towards individualism against deferentialism and authority and tradition," says Ramesh A. Ponnuru, a senior editor at the National Review, a conservative opinion magazine.
Stad says that in comparison to the 1960s when hundreds of students participated in even the smallest elections, students today have no one concrete issue to fight for, making for little enthusiasm in the political arena.
"There is very little passion for today's issues," he says. "There's not a revolutionary issue for students to rally around. Students in the '60s actually did make a difference."
Politically-minded students say that in order to recruit their peers back into politics, they must first understand the causes of the disengagement.
"I see government as a vehicle for changing the world around me, but many young people don't see national or even state politics as a way of changing things," said Kara A. Shamy '03, one of the committee members for the IOP poll. "I wanted to see why that was."