Over the course of last year, amidst the arrival of a new president, a new student center, and a controversial new dining company, several student campaigns figured prominently in the unraveling of events. There was USLAC’s fight for better union wages and benefits; the Environmental Organizers Network’s (EON) negotiations with the administration for a greener campus; and most memorably, Students for Ending the War in Iraq’s (SEWI) extended brawl with Tom Kannam and the Investment Office over the University’s investment in weapons contractors Raytheon and General Dynamics.

For the most part, these campaigns came to logical conclusions, whether successful or not. The dining and Physical Plant unions struck an agreement with their bosses; President Roth adopted “greenness” as a key initiative, deciding to create a College for the Environment; and the Board of Trustees rejected SEWI’s call for divestment.

With a new year, though, comes a new activist order. SEWI, as it turns out, is calling it quits for the semester. With many leaders gone, the three remaining core members—Laura Heath ’11, Miranda Becker ’11 and Emily Caffery ’10—sent out an e-mail on Oct. 3 officially ending SEWI activity for the moment.

“With many of our last year members either abroad, graduated, or not returned, it’s much harder for us to be able to do the sorts of activism we were able to do last year,” they wrote. “We have also found that, this semester, we’re all buried in excess commitments, such as schoolwork, and we simply cannot be as involved as we were last year.”

In its place, SEWI members confirmed, the one-year-old University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) has quickly emerged as a key player on the student political scene.

“A lot of the freshmen this year, instead of going to groups like SEWI, are going to SDS from what I’ve seen,” Becker said. “I’m looking forward to seeing what SDS is gonna do. They’re crazy.”

Started by Morgan Hamill ’11 last year, SDS has significantly expanded this semester, securing a core group of 15 to 20 members buffered by another 20 or so on the periphery, Hamill estimates. Their first public initiative, a call to kick the Bank of America ATM off campus because of the bank’s investments in companies that practice the environmentally-harmful practice of mountain top removal, symbolizes the way in which the new national SDS organization (founded in 2006) has moved away from the first SDS, which lasted from 1960 to 1969. As opposed to the more ideological and perhaps extreme steps taken by SDS boomers, the organization today tends to position itself in the realm of practical, local organizing rooted in tangible solutions.

“The dominant conception of activism right now is the whole ’60s bit,” Hamill said. “That’s not how it works anymore. All the groups I’ve worked with are about moving away from protests and thinking about how to get people involved and feel like there’s agency here. The trend in the left in the last 20 years is to get less rigid about ideology and to get more serious about making people’s lives better.”

Also, while SDS was more often than not the province of relatively elite male whites in the ’60s, the SDS of the new millennium has, along with college students in general, diversified.

“At least compared to the ’60s, we have a relatively high ratio of chapters at community colleges,” Hamill said. “Activism in the last 20 years has been done largely by regular people who are fed up with the state of their lives.”

The group’s ambitious plans for the year in many ways reflect the new SDS’ emphasis on diversity. They have partnered with the women’s rights group Feminist Network (FemNet) to lobby the school for a more substantial sexual assault program at the health center. A “student power” group is looking into on-campus issues of student debt and tuition. Members are also aiming to bring to campus Patrick J O’Connor, author of “The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” a book defending Abu-Jamal, a journalist and Black Panther who has sat on death row for the last 27 years after being charged—some say unfairly—with the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner.

On the Iraq War front, SDS is considering re-raising the divestment issue as well as partnering with Central Connecticut State University, the University of Hartford and the University of Connecticut in order to hold a statewide student anti-war conference. They are also, in coordination with EON and FemNet, bringing Evan Greer, a political folk singer, and Broadcast Live, a political hip-hop act, to campus next Tuesday for a social justice event.

Jon Booth ’12, a White Plains, NY native and a key member in this year’s SDS, started his own SDS chapter at his high school. Besides raising awareness and money around last year’s Jena 6 event, Booth and his group helped organize a boycott of classes for roughly 700 students from White Plains High School during the 2006 immigration reform protests that had swept the country.

“It was basically every Latino student in the high school and a few others,” Booth said. “The [administration] ended up having to get a police escort. They decided they couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

Wesleyan’s history of radicalism attracted Booth, but since his arrival here he has been somewhat disappointed by the slightly tame tenor of political activism on campus. At the same time, Booth forcefully rejects the violent radicalism characteristic of the Weather Underground, or certain University students who attacked then-President Bill Chase’s house with a fire bomb .

“It’s now 2008, and we’re not planning on firebombing buildings in order to recapture some vision of the ’60s or the anti-Apartheid movement,” he said. “I don’t think it’s usually acceptable for privileged college students to blow up the president’s house because they are angry about the war. That doesn’t make sense in any way.”

All the while, Booth did not rule all options out.

“I do think that there have been times in history—the 1930s in Germany and Italy, for example—where some active resistance could have made some kind of difference,” he said. “We’re obviously not in Germany in 1939 right now. Times may change, though.”

Though SDS appears to be optimistic about mounting another divestment campaign, there is a certain level of bitterness about the first campaign’s outcome among former SEWI members. According to Erik Rosenberg ’08, the National Organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists and a prominent SEWI member for the last several years, his group was cynically manipulated by the Board of Trustees.

“The Board knew from the start that they were going to say no,” Rosenberg said. “They set up this whole phony bureaucracy that meant absolutely nothing and just kept meeting with us. They were just leading us on—giving us the run-around.”

Rosenberg also implicated President Michael Roth in his indictment, accusing him of using lofty liberal rhetoric in front of Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama—who spoke at commencement—only days after having rejected the proposal of divestment behind closed doors.

“I was really disgusted by Michael Roth’s commencement speech about peace and progressive leaders,” Rosenberg said. “I think he was being a complete hypocrite by portraying Wesleyan as a progressive liberal place after having rejected an opportunity to really demonstrate what Wes is really about.”

For the remaining SEWI members, however, there is still a sense of hope. The campaign for divestment did result in the creation of the Committee for Socially Responsible Investment—a legitimate venue, they say, for future divestment campaigns.

At the same time, organizing meetings with WSA representatives and North College administrators is slightly less romantic than pitching a tent for months on the lawn of the Investment Office, a measure SEWI took last year. Sometimes, however, when it comes to practicality, the romance of political theater, while seductive, pales in comparison to the utility of wiggling one’s way into an institutional boardroom.

“It is a new age, and the thing that’s worked then aren’t going to work now,” Becker said. “The Internet has changed everything, cell phones have changed everything, and there’s no way to think that social dynamics and activism could remain the same after that.“