A vice president stumping for his party at the Pfister Hotel, Professor of Theology Dan Maguire drawing the ire of conservative groups and Marquette students ready to make their voices heard at the polls.

In other words, as far as politics on campus go, the fall of 1980 may as well have been the fall of 2006.

A week before this year's elections, a look back at news clips from years past – and at the experiences of faculty who have been at Marquette longer than most current students have been alive – shed light on the political history of a university that, despite its differences from today's campus, is strikingly familiar.

High stakes, high tensions

For Marquette students today, activism may mean taking a stand against the "Gold" nickname decision or joining a "Save Darfur" Facebook group.

But Susan Mountin, director of the Manresa project and a former Marquette student, remembers a time when protests on campus meant fighting to bring peers home from Vietnam before they made the trip in a body bag.

Mountin, an undergraduate from 1967-'71, said her classmates were involved in their fair share of anti-war activism, including an incident in which protesting students locked faculty members in a building during a faculty dinner.

With peers and family members being drafted and serving overseas, she said students had a very clear idea of the war's cost.

"It's a lot different when your friends are over there dying," she said.

Other instances of Vietnam-era activism included picketing against representatives of Dow Chemical, a company that manufactured napalm for the United States military, and an anti-ROTC sit-in that led to dozens of arrests.

A 'hotbed of apathy'

But according to James Scotton, an associate professor of journalism who has taught at Marquette since 1978, such incidents are more the exception than the rule.

Scotton said the political climate at Marquette has typically been a relatively calm one when compared with much livelier campuses such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Scotton said while the occasional issue has sparked interest – the Vietnam protests, the debate over whether Marquette should withdraw its investments from companies that did business in South Africa while the country was still practicing apartheid – political topics generally fail to get a rise out of students and faculty.

"I think someone said, 'Marquette is the hotbed of apathy,'" he said.

He said that even after the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, political interest among college students did not pick up noticeably.

"All these people wanted to vote, but I'm not sure they go and vote," he said.

Loosening up

Janet Boles, a professor of political science who has taught at Marquette since 1980, said she has seen a once-restrictive administration relax its efforts to curb political expression over the years.

She recalled one incident, reported in the Oct. 31, 1980 Tribune, in which the administration confiscated materials from an informational booth on birth control in the student union and threatened to prevent the students involved from graduating.

"The university administration really felt it had to keep a very tight lid on things," she said.

She credited University President the Rev. Robert A. Wild for fostering a more permissive environment for discourse, but said student political expression on campus is only recently perking up.

"I think at some point, Marquette students just got beaten down by the administration, and they're only beginning to realize that they have more freedom than they ever dreamed they had," she said.

Same as it ever was?

Whatever changes may have occurred, students and faculty from bygone eras find plenty of familiar issues on today's campus.

Recent debates about whether the university needs to bring more politically conservative speakers to campus, for instance, closely mirror a Sept. 29, 1961 letter to the Tribune on the same topic.

And spats between competing political student groups over everything from films shown on campus to political bias among faculty are as easy to find in the pages of a 40-year-old Tribune as they are today.

Mountin said that despite considerable cultural changes across her nearly four decades at Marquette, some aspects of politics on campus have remained remarkably consistent.

"You had clusters of students that were very active then," she said, "And you have clusters of students that are very active now."