Historians of American student activism will be familiar with Robert Cohen’s When the Old Left Was Young, a history of the American Student Union of the 1930s, and of the activism that surrounded it. Cohen has put a series of excerpts from that book up on the web, along with about a hundred documents and memoirs of the era.
The site, Activist Impulses: Campus Radicalism in the 1930s, is well worth taking a wander through.
I find this YouTube video of a “Freeze” action at the University of Vermont last Friday interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m fascinated by the connections between contemporary Improv Everywhere style “actions” and pre-internet campus pranks and playfulness, and this blends those traditions in a compelling way.
Second, the freeze commemorated a 1988 administration building takeover — that a protest from that era is what’s being memorialized gives us yet another reminder that today’s activists have far more on their minds than the sixties.
Ten thousand people participated in Colorado University’s annual marijuana smoke-out on the campus quad yesterday, twice as many as toked up one year ago. In the past, campus cops have photographed offenders or turned on the sprinkler system, but yesterday, outnumbered 500-to-1, they simply gave up.
Because of the scale of the event, it became a magnet for students promoting other causes. CU junior Max Lichtenstein handed out more than a hundred Rice Krispies treats attached to flyers asking students to call the White House to protest the genocide in Darfur … “Tomorrow, when you’re sober.”
Men were invited to march alongside women for the entirety of Columbia University and Barnard College’s joint Take Back the Night march for the first time this year. (In the past, men have been permitted to join the march en route.)
A representative of Columbia Men Against Violence said that the inclusion of men for the full march was “an experiment.” A march organizer said that there would be a women-only section at the head of the march, and that the decision was made in part because “we recognize that men are survivors of sexual assault.”
An estimated five hundred students participated in Thursday night’s march.
A blog on the University of Montana anti-sweatshop sit-in. The most recent entry, from Friday, is a recap of the sit-in and the issues behind it.
studentactivism.net 
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