Campus Aftershocks

On Sept. 11, as TV networks began to run loops of disaster footage, Tom Graham sat with his friends on the couch, "snuffling and crying and watching the news."

But after a couple days of that, he'd had it. Though the University of New Mexico graduate student had never been a political organizer - never even taped a flier in a store window - Mr. Graham decided to hold a candlelight demonstration and open forum for the Albuquerque community. He ran all over the city, asking people for advice. "They just took me by the hand and led me through it," he says. "All kinds of people. It seems like they wanted to do something - to be a part of something."

First a local newspaper, then radio and TV stations, pitched in to advertise the event. In the end, "like 500 people showed up. It blew me away," Graham says. "I thought there'd be 50 people there, and mostly my friends."

Across the nation, young people who never gave activism a second thought have been catapulted into action by the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York. Overnight, they put together vigils, donated blood, and organized rallies. On campuses better known for niche interest groups with clearly defined boundaries, thousands of students have sought ways to confront a suddenly new world - together.

The surge of activity may have been a natural response to the shock of the news. Nonetheless, some say the broad outreach that's stirring among students could well outlast the initial drive to lend a hand or wave the flag.

"I think people didn't recognize the responsibility of being a citizen, of being a member of a community before," says Deepinder Mayell, a member of Boston College's Global Justice Project. "There's something to be said about individualism and living in an isolated bubble, particularly on college campuses. Something like this makes people more aware of their role in our government, and our government's role in the world."

The ways in which that bubble abruptly burst has altered some schools' long-standing images: Flags have fluttered across campus at the University of California, Berkeley, famous for antiwar protests during the Vietnam era.

Elsewhere, there is simply the sense that students had been jolted into a new set of priorities.

Welena Pozharsky, a junior at New York University, says political interest has spiked sharply on her campus, just north of the World Trade Center. "Every class now starts with a discussion about this," she says, adding that the students had "zero political interest" prior to the attack. Now, she says, CNN is on constantly. "We're talking about a lot of things we wouldn't have been talking about a week ago."

At Emerson College in Boston, junior Elisabeth Colabraro has been working furiously on a peace banner for students to sign. She detects a new urgency among the politically involved.

"It's a lot different now," she says. "We could have war tomorrow, so you can't take a minute break. It's like a 24/7 job."

Campuses, of course, have long been fertile ground for organizing. But the political fervor and mass protests of the late 1960s that set a high-water mark in the postwar era, have been more studied than emulated by college students in recent decades.

Still, over the past decade, many schools have seen a renewed commitment to grass-roots rallying around such issues as the environment and sweatshop labor. Just last year, "living wage" protests put Harvard University in the hot seat. And the number of students committed to protesting globalization at the meetings of world leaders has been growing steadily.

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