College Activists Form National Peace Group

Student activists here are coordinating a nationwide effort to deliver a united collegiate message to George Bush and his policy-makers: no Persian Gulf war.

Student groups have been forming across the country to protest the U.S. military buildup in the gulf, but students at three Washington universities decided that the peace movement needs a national network.

The newly formed pacifist group, Aegis Justice, hopes eventually to bring together as many as 700 university organizations. The group already has the support of at least 200 university organizations nationwide, 23-year-old Dwayne Voegeli said. The group was founded by Voegeli, a senior at George Washington University majoring in international politics, and about 200 other students from Georgetown, George Washington and American universities a few weeks ago.

Aegis Justice is organizing “teach-ins” on campuses nationwide next week and a student march in the capital in late January.

Extensive national student coalitions already exist, but the Aegis Justice network wants to connect them and let the groups exchange ideas and lend support in protesting the U.S. military involvement in the Persian Gulf, Voegeli said.

The coalition includes a variety of large and small, radical and conservative campuses, including the University of Amherst, the University of Chicago, Brandeis College in Massachusetts and UC Berkeley.

Although the network is “for peace and not war, however it is done,” Voegeli said, each student organization has its own agenda as to how the United States should peacefully end the crisis.

Voegeli said Aegis Justice is hoping to qualify as a nonprofit organization. The students now are paying for long-distance calls and faxes themselves, but the group has applied for private grants.

Several regional and national student coalitions have also been synchronizing campus efforts.

For example, about 50 universities from New York to the West Coast have joined the California Student Network Against U.S. Intervention in the Middle East. The group has a list of demands and is planning a series of news conferences next week.

“There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrations on college campuses in the last month,” said Rhodney Ward, a UC Berkeley senior who is part of a national network of about 100 colleges called the Student Action Union. “When we stand together, we are stronger. We can make ourselves stronger if we network.”

But traditionally radical campuses such as Berkeley are not the only ones getting involved in the peace movement.

At the normally tranquil University of Montana in Missoula, student protests against the war are making the campus “a hotbed,” said J. V. Bennett, a senior who helped form the Student Coalition for Social Responsibility a few weeks ago.

The University of Montana’s coalition brings together 16 historically feuding groups on the campus--fraternities and environmentalists, abortion advocates and opponents, Bennett said.

The first Aegis Justice national newspaper will be published in February from the small, conservative campus of Rider College in Lawrenceville, N.J.