UC Santa Cruz Is Latest Campus to Allow Student Ballot Proposal : ‘Suicide Pill’ Measure Sets Off Hot Debate on Nuclear War

With two weeks left in the winter quarter at the University of California campus here, Stephen Schwartz looked at the unread text book lying by his bed and frowned.

“I should have read that about three weeks ago,” the lanky sophomore said with a sigh.

It’s not that Schwartz is lazy. It’s just that lately he’s been preoccupied with what he considers a more compelling concern than school work: nuclear war.

For the last few months, Schwartz, 20, and a handful of other UC Santa Cruz students have been busy drumming up votes for a controversial student ballot measure on nuclear weapons.

The most bitterly debated element is a request that the university stockpile suicide pills to be dispensed to students in the event that nuclear war poisons the area with radiation fallout. Voting on the proposal begins Monday and will continue through April 9.

University Chancellor Robert Sinsheimer has denounced the proposal as a “Jonestown solution,” and said he will never permit the university to stockpile suicide pills, the ingredients of which are not specified in the measure, regardless of the outcome of the vote.

New Rallying Cry

Nonetheless, the so-called “suicide option,” which originated last year at Brown University in Rhode Island, has become a new rallying cry for opponents of nuclear weapons on campuses across the country. Later this spring, students at UC Santa Barbara will vote on a similar measure.

Like the Brown proposal, which was approved by a 60% majority, the Santa Cruz measure, if adopted by students, would not be binding on the university administration. However, backers of the plan--who include Schwartz and student body President Kevin Gillis--consider it an important symbolic gesture.

Moreover, the Santa Cruz proposal goes beyond the request to stockpile poison pills adopted at Brown. It also asks the university to designate burial grounds on campus to be used in the event of radiation fallout and requests installation of radiation monitoring stations at several student lounges.

On a more practical level, the measure would urge the University of California to sever its ties with the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories. Sponsors say that the proposal’s morbid aspects are necessary to draw attention to key nuclear weapons issues.

Rejected Traditional Methods

“We thought about traditional methods like a freeze initiative or a rally,” said Peter Blackshaw, 20, one of the authors of the measure. “While a lot of those activities are good, they just don’t hit home as well as they could. If there is a nuclear war, you are going to die--that’s the point we are trying to make.”

But many students admit to being initially repelled by the proposal’s more ghastly features.

“As far as I’m concerned it’s a great feeling being alive on this green-blue planet, and it’s kind of weird to be sitting here discussing suicide,” said Ian Black, a junior.

Despite his optimism, Black voiced his support for the proposal, adding that he would trust the university to “pull through in the last great act of bureaucracy” and dispense the suicide pills.

Concern over nuclear weapons issues is certainly evident on the campus and in the surrounding community. The university’s Academic Senate was the first to support severing UC’s connection to the weapons labs, while the Santa Cruz City Council supports a nuclear freeze.

High-Profile Issue

Anti-nuclear weapons groups abound on campus and in the community and the UC Santa Cruz Adlai Stevenson Program on Nuclear Policy, formed last spring, sponsors classes, lectures and films on nuclear issues.

Nonetheless, opposition to the suicide pill proposal has been mounting on the 7,000-student campus, even among those who support other anti-nuclear aspects of the ballot measure.

Several students have formed an opposing group called Students Against Nuclear Escalation.

“Our motto is here today, here tomorrow,” said SANE organizer Haley Mack, a sophomore. “We can’t support a proposal that arranges for our collective death.”

Mack’s group is urging students to reject the proposal as being “too negative” and instead advocates working in more positive ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

The proposal also is opposed by Chancellor Sinsheimer, who authorized the election, but is urging students to vote “no.”

Supports Nuclear Freeze

Sinsheimer, the only UC chancellor to support a nuclear freeze and to oppose UC management of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, declined to be interviewed. However, he said in a statement that he would never allow the campus to stockpile suicide pills.

“I cannot adopt nor recommend such a nihilistic, such a Jonestown solution,” the statement said. “I find it difficult to believe that UCSC students lack sufficient concern about this issue so as to need such gruesome stimuli.”

Some on campus say that Sinsheimer may have approved the anti-nuclear measure only to ensure that there was a large enough student vote to approve the other item on the ballot--student funding for a $6.5-million recreational facility.

In order for the vote to be official, at least a quarter of the students must vote.

Results of the voting are expected to be released on April 12.