Liam Stack, a senior at Georgetown University, remembers when fighting for a cause seemed futile.

Stack, media coordinator for the Georgetown Living Wage Coalition, and the Coalition's members were frustrated by their inability to negotiate with the university for their cause: a wage for all university employees that would put them above the poverty line.

The Living Wage Coalition staged a hunger strike, protests and a sit-in to bring attention to their cause.

"Ten days later, we won," Stack said.

The university agreed in principle to raise the pay of its janitors and other employees to a living wage March 23.

Stack is one of many students across the country involved in a recent rise in campus activism.

At Washington University in St. Louis, members of the Student Worker Alliance took over the admissions office for 19 days, staging a sit-in and brief hunger strike until some of their demands were met Friday.

Eighty graduating seniors at Saint Louis University sat in the president's office to protest a graduation fee within the last two weeks.

Student activism is not new on college campuses. Students did some protesting in the 1930s, but developed their voice of protest in the 1960s, according to Athan Theoharis, professor of history. He cited Students for a Democratic Society, which started the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley in 1964 and began protesting the Vietnam War soon after.

But such activism is difficult to sustain, and its involvement is cyclical.

"It's like a match. You light it, it blazes, and then is extinguished," Theoharis said.

Still, students fight for their causes.

"They are articulate and have a certain degree of passion that can be electrifying," Theoharis said.

The accessibility of students makes them relatively easy to organize when they believe an issue is worth pursuing, according to Susan Mountin, director of the Manresa Project.

And many students join a cause simply because their friends are doing it.

"I know this sounds bad, but I knew people doing it, so I did it," Stack said.

But even those students often develop an understanding of the issues and can transform into a leader for the group, Mountin said.

Stack said when he first talked with university employees, he was hooked and worked to get them a living wage.

At some universities, the student body needs little convincing to support an issue. At Boston College, 84 percent of the student body voting in the last student government election supported rephrasing the university's nondiscrimination clause to include sexual orientation, according to Nick Salter, a sophomore at Boston College and an organizer of the campaign.

The university has not yet rephrased the clause, which Salter believes is unclear regarding treatment of homosexuals.

"We're hoping for the best," he said.

And success in a protest is difficult without support from the community. In Georgetown's case, local officials and unions supported the Living Wage Coalition's efforts, helping the Coalition succeed, Stack said.

But in some larger issues, there is only so much that can be done.

"Students raised the issues, but it didn't bring down the Vietnam War," Theoharis said.

But at universities like Marquette, the student body needs to be convinced to care. Mountin said the undergraduate student body is apathetic toward many issues compared to 30 years ago.

But if students are not personally affected by an issue, she said, they are less likely to fight for it. For instance, during Vietnam, students were afraid of being drafted, so many protested the war.

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on April 26 2005.