Campus Concern

Who's afraid of the Bomb ?

The vote may have meant that students at Brown University were anti-Bomb or, possibly, that they were pro-poison. By a tally of 1,044 to 687, collegians at the elite Ivy League campus in Providence called on the school administration to stockpile cyanide pills for use in the event of nuclear war. To critics who called the vote preposterous, Jason Salzman, a sponsor of the referendum, had a ready reply: "The nuclear arms race is killing us, and we succeeded in making a lot of people think about it."

One who pondered it was Brown President Howard Swearer. The goal of dramatizing the nuclear danger had been met, he said, but Brown would not purchase cyanide. But not everyone thought the vote was a clear advance for nuclear awareness. Child Psychiatrist Robert Coles of the Harvard Medical School reported the reaction of a blue-collar worker in Lynn, Mass., who said, "These spoiled rich kids. Everyone else is going to suffer a slow death, and they want a quick way out."

Coles, author of the five-volume Children of Crisis, initiated a small controversy of his own by announcing that fears of nuclear war among the young are largely confined to children of affluent parents. Most studies have concluded that such fears are spread fairly evenly among children of classes and races. The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, which has been polling students nation wide at about 130 high schools since 1975, reports that 30% of its respondents worry often about war; the rate holds steady for blacks and whites, for those who are college-bound and those who are not. Says Jerald Bachman, a social psychologist at the institute: "On nuclear war, there is not much difference of opinion based on race, and very little difference related to college plans."

Coles' position is founded on lengthy interviews with 108 children in six states. He feels his colleagues' use of questionnaires accounts for the differences between his study and virtually all others. Says Coles: "The only way is to get to know the children over a long period of time."

The specter of Armageddon, according to Coles, does not haunt the ghettos or working-class neighborhoods as it does the Brown campus. Says he: "The children in the ghetto are worried about the next meal, about where they will find work." Concludes Coles: "The nuclear-freeze movement has become all too tied up with upper-middle-class privilege."