Students Mobilize to Battle AIDS Through Education

Dr. Richard Keeling had been speaking about acquired immune deficiency syndrome to the collegiate group gathered here for nearly an hour. His facts and figures were sobering; his slide presentations often graphic.

Near the end of his lecture, Keeling, the University of Virginia’s Student Health Services director who chairs the AIDS task force of the American College Health Assn., paused. Then he said, “We sit here in Berkeley a comfortable distance from AIDS. We’ve been talking about an hour, and in that hour, somebody has died of it.

“But we do have a ray of hope in the commitment of people to provide education about primary risk reduction. That’s our prevention vaccine.”

Commitment’s the Issue

That commitment to AIDS education in the nation’s colleges and universities--and often the lack of it--was the issue here at the University of California, Berkeley’s “AIDS and the College Campus” conference Thursday and Friday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union.

Organizers expected about 200 people. They got 435, some from as far away as Dartmouth, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.

“We were just overwhelmed at the turnout,” said Cara Vaughn, information specialist at Berkeley’s Student Health Service. “Everyone is beginning to realize something has to be done about AIDS education on the college campuses. We started our (AIDS education) program here at the beginning of 1985, and we’re one of the oldest programs around. That’s quite phenomenal.”

On most college campuses across the country, though, AIDS education and information about safe sex practices has been slow to appear. “These guys, the West Coast college health educators, inspired us on the East Coast, in the Ivy Leagues and elsewhere,” said Beverlie Conant Sloane, director of health education at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire.

“The West Coast schools are the leaders in AIDS education, especially Berkeley and Stanford. We’re looking at their programs, and others out here to see what works in getting the information out.

“We don’t have AIDS on our campus and we don’t want it,” said Conant Sloane. “This is the generation of kids, our college students, that we need to educate. If we can get to them, we can break the cycle (of AIDS).”

But breaking that cycle may not be easy, according to health educators and students at the Berkeley seminar. In speeches, and at round-table discussions and workshops during the conference, they talked about the many problems in trying to inform students about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

Funding Has Been Slim

Some college administrations have been slow to act on the issue of AIDS education, student disinterest has often been high, homophobia is a problem and funding has been slim for programs, said Keeling. There also has been criticism about such programs from religious and political groups.

“And there is the denial,” he added, “the ‘it won’t happen to me’ (attitude) among students, and certain obstacles from other groups.”

At workshops and round-tables, students from various universities voiced similar concerns.

“Our (AIDS awareness) program got started through a mandate of the council of presidents, after they decided they had to have a policy on what to do if a student got AIDS,” said Andrew Hauser, who serves on the Student Health Advisory Committee and an AIDS education program at the Claremont Colleges.

Said Greg Miller of the University of Santa Clara: “I’m on our AIDS committee formed by the president, but we have a conservative Catholic campus and it’s going to be a long road.”

At Stanford University, Ken Ruebush said the AIDS education project’s aim had been “to take condoms out of the closet. We started giving them away at parties, talking about them as designer condoms, having a condom rating contest.”

Stanford began its AIDS education program in the fall of 1985, said Ruebush, coordinator of the program and a German studies student.

Doug Conaway, a UC Berkeley journalism graduate student who serves as an assistant in Berkeley’s AIDS Prevention Program at the Student Health Service, said, “We have tried to normalize AIDS to (students), to destigmatize it. They hear positive statements about what can be done, not hysteria. And they’ve responded.”

UC Irvine’s AIDS Education Project was established in September, 1985, by the vice chancellor of student affairs. Prior to that, the only campus activity on the subject of AIDS had been a May, 1985, AIDS awareness day, sponsored by the Gay and Lesbian Student Union.

UCI’S Numerous Projects

David Souleles, who became chairman of the organization in January of ’85 and a member of the AIDS Education Project, said that the university now has representatives on its AIDS project committee from diverse groups on campus, and several programs aimed at educating students about AIDS. These include weekly ads about safe sex which appear in the student newspaper, a video about AIDS, a counseling service for students with AIDS or AIDS-related complex (ARC) and an education phone service operated by the student health center.

Other University of California schools have formed or are in the process of forming AIDS advisory committees, a measure recommended in October, 1986, by the AIDS Policy Steering Committee which is appointed by the UC system’s president. Some campuses have set up AIDS educational projects as well.

UCLA’s AIDS Task Force created the school’s AIDS Coordinating Committee in September, 1986, and the group has scheduled its first AIDS Awareness Week, Feb. 17-19.

Planned are various programs, including workshops at residence halls, lectures, panel discussions and 17 different information sites with 35,000 brochures, said Bonnie Leibowitz, who is directing the campus-wide AIDS education program.

“I see the colleges as the place to do intensive education about AIDS,” said Leibowitz, an education specialist with UCLA’s Student Health Service and a doctoral candidate in psychology. “The question is not how many people have AIDS, but how many are infected. They are giving figures of between 200,000 and 300,000 people in California already infected with this disease.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, California has the second-largest number of AIDS cases--6,394--in the nation. New York has 9,270.

“Everybody has had funding problems,” said Rich Wolitski, a graduate student in psychology and campus coordinator for the AIDS Education Project at California State University, Long Beach. “You can get different departments to help with certain programs,” said Wolitski, who served as facilitator for the student round-table discussions.

“And there are a wide variety of materials you can get donated by community organizations or corporations,” he advised the students. You can have school fund-raisers. Don’t think you have to do all of it by yourselves. If you’re creative, you can get help.

“You have to talk to people realistically,” he said. “You can’t talk around the issues. We need to provide information the students need, so if they do decide to be sexually active, they will have the proper information to be responsible about it.”

Wolitski said that Long Beach and the other 18 schools in the California State University system have AIDS task forces on campus--as mandated by Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds in 1986.

Cal State Long Beach’s AIDS education project is funded by a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, said Wolitski. Campus religious groups and the interfraternity council have also assisted with special programs.

“We’ve worked with the groups within the structure that they are comfortable with,” he explained. “The religious groups have had lectures on the spiritual needs of AIDS patients. We don’t want people to be uncomfortable with issues and we don’t want them to think we’re promoting sex.”

When it was Scott Miller’s turn to speak at the student round table, he got everybody’s sympathy and, later, their promises to help.

Miller, a senior philosophy student at Moorhead State University in Minnesota, had come to ask for assistance in setting up an AIDS education program at his school.

Since joining an administrative committee to deal with AIDS education on campus last December, he said he has been unable to recruit a single volunteer. “It’s different here (in California),” Miller said. “The social environment they operate in is simply more open and aware.

“The people in the administration support what I am trying to do, but they have to take into account the public reaction,” he continued. “There are serious problems with the community. It is mostly Lutheran, so religion is definitely a part of it, but it’s a cultural thing, too. There are things they just don’t talk about.”

Miller said he knew of no Moorhead student who had AIDS, but that a former student had died recently of the disease.

To date, since June, 1981, when AIDS was discovered, only 156 cases have been reported in Minnesota, most of those in urban areas. North Dakota has reported only three AIDS cases.

“People may have remained passive in the past, but they simply can’t do it now,” said Miller. “Something has to be done on the college campuses, and in the public schools. If they don’t know college students have sex, well, I am speechless.”