Campus Chronicle

Issue date: 2/22/05 Section: News

Media Credit: Lindsay Falkner Students protest recruiters with their own rhetoric.

Students carrying banners follow recruiters as they leave campus.

Protesters from various student organizations battled the cold in front of The School of Public Health Building at 1617 W. Taylor in opposition to an Air Force Recruitment lecture hosted by the Public Health Student Association in an attempt to expose job opportunities in the military field to UIC students with medical backgrounds.

Approximately a dozen students from organizations such as the Students for Social Justice (SSJ), Students Without Religious Dogma (SWORD), and the International Socialist Organization worked collectively with large anti-war posters and pamphlets in hand in order to spread their disdain at the persistent military recruitment presence on campus.

"I don't think that they should be allowed on campus, recruiting kids to go to war to kill people," said Erika Claich, a fourth year English student and member of Campus Anti-War.

Some of the protesters thought that military presence, for whatever reason, do not belong on the UIC campus.

Ryan Donnelly, second year psychology student and member of the Students for Social Justice organization believes having military recruiters operating on university grounds is contradictory to what UIC is all about. "This is a poor choice because the university is supposed to be about bettering the quality of life whereas these recruiters represent something totally different."

Protesters were concerned that the main reason why such recruitment activities occur on campus is because UIC is a predominantly working class school with a large minority population. The fear is this makes some students susceptible to financial pressures, making job opportunities in the Armed Forces seem all more the enticing.

Taking place between noon and 1 p.m. in room 132 of SPH building, three Air Force recruiters spoke on the work of public health officers in the Air Force. Among the topics discussed were amount of time served, pay and benefits, the role of medical personnel in the Air Force, and the potential for educational opportunities.

The attendance of PHSA members at the U.S. Air Force Recruitment seminar was sparse. No more than ten students were present in the room at a given time. Some of those present were actually members of the protesting organization who used the time to actively question the three panel members of the recruitment team on U.S. military policy.

Topics that protesters bombarded recruiters with included depleted uranium risks, biological engineering concerns, and forced drug usage amongst military personnel. The recruiters stayed clear of directly answering the protesters concerns, saying humbly that they did not know.

In response to a student protester's question regarding Abu Grhaib and Guantanamo Bay, one of the recruiters responded, "We don't make the policies; our job as recruiters is to answer any questions that students have about joining the Air Force public health program and its benefits."

As such questions were directed at the recruiters, heated discussions ensued. However, the resulting arguments came between students representing the protesting organizations and students representing the PHSA rather than a demonstration aimed to be between protestors and recruiters.

"This was obviously not about recruitment but about giving students who might consider joining the Air Force as a job option," said Gus E. Turner, President of the PHSA. "I respect where the protesters are coming from but I still think we should give students all the opportunities are out there and respect the recruiters who are just doing their jobs."

At some points during the seminar PHSA students cautioned attending protesters when they began to ask sensitive questions regarding U.S. Military policies. Darlene Duggan, a member of the PHSA, at one point during an argument, advised that protesters should leave if they continued to pull the seminar in a direction for which it was not intended.

"Amongst us [PHSA] we thought it was a good idea to have [recruiters] come so that other students can get the information that they may want," she said after the seminar. "I don't think it was really fair for students from those organizations to come and use this event as a means to vent their frustration."

Yet some protesters, like Eric Peters, a non-student, contested that exposing students to job opportunities in the military sector is unjust and hypocritical. "UIC has an anti-discriminatory policy and now they're bringing in employers that have openly discriminatory policy," he said referring to policies such as the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the U.S. Armed Forces.

When confronted with this question from Peters at the seminar Technical Sgt. John Olson, the principal recruiter, readily admitted that the U.S. military is "the most discriminatory employer there is," squashing any further debate.

"Programs like this are, in all honesty, solely informational. We're just here to get the word out there and not to pressure anyone into anything that they might not want to do," Sgt. Olson said.

When asked about some of the protesters' signs that were being held outside the building saying things like "Travel, Make Friends, Kill Children," Sgt. Olson could only laugh and say: "I've been in the military for 17 years and I've never killed anyone."

In a related incident Tuesday, Feb. 15, the same protesters representing what they refer to as a "coalition" stymied an attempt for Army recruiters to set up shop outside of the bookstore in SCE. Using shouting tactics and dispensing anti-recruitment literature they drove off the recruiters in less than an hour.

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