Talk about a generation gap. It seems that a group of alumni from Harvard are upset that their alma mater isn’t a hotbed of antiwar activity as it was when they attended the university 40 years ago. The 13 alumni signed onto a letter to Harvard President Drew Faust, asking her to form a task force to look into remedies for what they see as the lack of mass campus organizing against the country’s latest unjust war.

Under the leadership of businessman Gilbert S. Doctorow, the graduates wrote that “we are concerned by what we see to be the widespread apathy and political indifference of the student body at Harvard College today.” The group questioned whether the school’s “recruitment criteria and procedures have gone seriously wrong” or life on campus “is not giving due encouragement to civic courage and political engagement.”

President Faust has not responded to the letter nor commented about it in the press.

Harvard’s Associate Dean Judith Kidd told the Boston Globe that students on her campus are politically active, but not in the same way that those in the 60s generation were. She cited as an example the fact that students last year went on a hunger strike in support of the university’s security guards who were demanding more equitable salaries.

A check of Harvard’s glossary of student organizations shows that there are still many of the same types of groups (including African American, Latino, and queer) on campus now as there were in the late 60s and early 70s.

College activism in general seems to be in full swing. According to Mother Jones Magazine’s “Best of Campus Activism” last year: 33 college students went on a “freedom ride” to 19 antigay religious and military colleges, including West Point and Brigham Young University; 3,000 University of Texas-Austin students showed up for an immigrants’ rights rally; and students at the University of Connecticut greeted the homophobic Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with a “Kiss a Queer” booth. Over 20 universities have responded to student concerns over the genocide in Darfur by divesting in companies that do business with the government of Sudan.

While students haven’t stopped being activists, there is the perception that they aren’t organizing around key political issues. Perhaps that’s because the lack of a draft and the outrageous cost of a college education have lowered the number of students willing to spend time in the streets. Then there’s the fact that the mainstream media doesn’t give them much coverage when they do. Student activism is not a regular feature of TV news, as it was in the late 60s. Even the SF Chronicle and the Examiner seldom mention unrest on the local campuses.

There’s also the question of style. The students of today can’t be expected to use the same tactics that were employed four decades ago. As much as I’d love to see college campuses closed down every week in opposition to the policies of this hideous administration, I don’t think that shutdowns and takeovers of the President’s Office are this generation’s way of taking a stand.

Still, they would be nice once in a while, if only for old times sake.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical Italian queer atheist writer, performer and former Temple U student activist. He can be reached through www.avicollimecca.com