Youngin Chung

Students for a Democratic Society and the President’s Office co-host a campus-wide collection to discuss the Iraq War on its sixth anniversary last Friday.

BY ALEXANDER ROLLE

In print | Published March 26, 2009

On Friday, March 20, Students for a Democratic Society and the President’s Office hosted a Collection to mark the passing of the sixth anniversary of the Iraq war. At 4:00 p.m., 40 to 50 members of the Swarthmore community, including students, faculty and administrators, gathered in
Kohlberg Coffee Bar to reflect on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the college’s role in the conflicts.

According to Vice President Maurice Eldridge ’61, SDS proposed the idea of a Collection to the President’s Office, which embraced the idea. “They came to talk to me about it because they thought, rightly, a collection as a college event is under-utilized … so we talked about how we might make use of it to commemorate this anniversary of the war,” he said.

The Collection was run in the manner of a Quaker meeting, in which there are no predetermined speakers and anyone attending can stand and speak if they are moved to do so. While different speakers might respond to each other’s statements, the meeting is supposed to involve sharing ideas and feelings rather than argument.

The silent intervals between speakers helped establish a somber tone. “It felt a significant event for those who were there … I thought the atmosphere was appropriately serious,” Eldridge said. Students who attended the event concurred. Rebekah Judson ’12 found that the meeting style gave added weight to its subject. “I really appreciated it. In some ways the silence was even more powerful than what was said,” she said.

Though the specific topics discussed at the Collection varied widely as different speakers were moved to share, several themes ran through the discussion. Among these were feelings of powerlessness and an inability to affect the United States’ policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as concern about the effects on the people of Iraq of a possible U.S. withdrawal.

Most of the discussion was built around contemplation of the wars’ impact on all those involved and reflection on the successes and failures of the recent anti-war movement. “I thought it went well. It certainly was not designed to be a practical event out of which would come action or a plan,” Eldridge said.

Several speakers made comparisons between the anti-war movement’s effects on the current wars and its effect on the war in Vietnam. Though the speakers covered a wide range of opinions on the subject, one student noted how easy it is to look back on a movement and see it as unified, forgetting the divisions and setbacks of the time.

Others discussed the benefits of a radical stance on war. Describing the anti-war movement as usually nuanced and the pro-war movement as often “black and white,” one student suggested that taking a radical anti-war stance was unlikely to cause radical action on the part of the government.
When discussing the proper direction the anti-war movement should take, one student expressed the need to build coalitions of student groups, each founded with a particular goal in mind but all working together to achieve a common purpose.

Given the nature of the event, the number of people in attendance was an important decider of the nature of the conversation. “Had [attendance] been much larger,” Eldridge said, “it might not have drawn the [comments] it got.” Reflecting on past experiences of Quaker meetings with hundreds of attendees, Eldridge noted that the feel of these types of gatherings could definitely be affected by the number of people involved.

Earlier in the college’s history, Collections happened regularly and were mandatory for all students.
When Eldridge attended Swarthmore “you had an assigned seat and your absence was noted,” he said.

After mandatory Collections were abandoned in the 1960s, “in the time when life among students became less regulated,” according to Eldridge, they enjoyed a brief return to popularity in the 1990s but have, once again, become infrequent.

Some students found that an hour and a half of quiet reflection had value in itself. “There is something nice about taking time out of your life to think about something important,” Judson said.

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