The war in Iraq? "It's not something I worry about."

How far we are from Vietnam.

College campuses, which in the late 1960s and early '70s erupted with fiery anti-war protests, are largely quiet today. Clusters of students are passionately for or against the war, but most debates arise from the increasingly polarized culture - whether filmmaker Michael Moore should speak at Utah Valley State College, whether the College Republicans at Utah State University should use a bake sale to protest affirmative action.

In the main, Iraq is off the radar screen of college students. It only comes up when a professor raises the topic.

"People don't have a lot of passion about things," says Brian Cooper, a 23-year-old U. sophomore. "They're having fun, doing their own thing."

Says Pete Phippen, an Asian studies major at USU in Logan: "Most of our students don't care."

There are myriad reasons, of course. The war in Iraq is yet young, and students' moods mirror changes in American culture since the Vietnam War.

But one reason for the apathy stands out: There is no draft. Students today are not in college to avoid the military; they are not a grade point away from being conscripted and sent overseas.

"If we had a draft, things would be a lot different," Cooper says.

"That," USU senior Steve Stoddard says, "might wake everybody up."

Campus clashes: It certainly was fuel for protesters during the Vietnam War.

Tim Funk was a U. student in the tumultuous spring of 1970 after National Guardsmen fired on anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. Four were killed and nine wounded.

Funk marched with hundreds of other students from the U.'s Park Building to downtown Salt Lake City's Federal Building and took part in other campus demonstrations in the weeks that followed.

"We had friends and neighbors and family who had been sent to Vietnam, and significant numbers of them were shot at, injured or killed," says Funk, now director of housing for Crossroads Urban Center.

"The dynamic was different because everybody could go," Funk says, but added, it wasn't all about self-interest.

There was consternation over the imposition of U.S. power in North Vietnam and propping up the government in South Vietnam. Americans realized that the millions of dollars President Lyndon Johnson had promised for the war on poverty were instead flowing to Southeast Asia.

"People owned that war," Funk says. "We were paying a price for it. We knew we were paying a price for it."

Moreover, the civil rights movement and budding environmental consciousness were turning the young to activism.

"There was a political reawakening," recalls Randy Dryer, a Salt Lake City attorney who was U. student-body president in the spring of 1970.

An abandoned building on campus was torched and protesters who refused to leave a sit-in at the Park Building were carried off in a police wagon, their bodies dead weight for the officers who hauled them out, one by one.

Dryer joined the march on the Washington Mall to protest the war but found himself the go-between on the U.'s campus. At one point, he stood between 200 protesters and about 50 athletes flexing to "take care of those radical hippies."

Protesters took over the campus newspaper, The Daily Utah Chronicle, forcing reporters and editors to publish off campus, Dryer recalls.

To defuse the volatile emotions, student leaders organized a vote on whether to shut down the campus to protest the war.

The vote was overwhelmingly against a boycott, and the protests quieted down.

At USU in Logan, one sleep-in to protest the war ended when those who disagreed set off pipe bombs nearby, recalls Bill Furlong, who has been teaching political science there since 1968. Several hundred students marched from campus to the county courthouse to protest the war.

The upheaval led to much good, Dryer says.

The year after Kent State triggered national protests, there was a big push to register college students to vote. At the next Utah political conventions, students ruled. Some 35 percent of delegates to the Democratic convention and 25 percent to the Republican gathering were students, he says.

"It was a time of great social responsibility," Dryer says. "It was a different time than now."

Indeed.

A new cause - money: Stoddard, the USU political science senior, wonders if today's student apathy is rooted in disillusionment with the presidency after Johnson took the nation to war and President Nixon lied about Watergate.

His professor, Michael Lyons, says the level of affluence in society is a big factor.

The high unemployment and economic insecurity of the 1970s gave way to the economic boom of the '80s and '90s.

"I can understand why students have turned away from politics. They are not threatened economically. The Cold War ended. The first Iraq war was a stunning military success. We made it look easy," Lyons says. "Students just drifted away from interest in politics and seemed much more concerned in pursuing career interests and making money and raising families."

In the past two years, Lyons says, there have been signs the long period of apathy is abating. The war and Bush's presidency are hotly debated in classes and on campus commons.

"The student body is more polarized politically on this campus than at any time since I came here," says Lyons, who has been at USU for 25 years.

Larry Boothe, a retired CIA employee who teaches a national-security class at USU, nonetheless says he is stunned that his students don't seem to feel they have a stake in the country.

"Their vision is: What can I do for myself? The thought of duty, honor, country never enters their minds - to the extent that you can't even get them to vote."

Only 42 percent of Utah's 18- to 24-year-olds voted in the 2000 presidential election. That number plunged to 20 percent in 2002, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Barely half of Utah's college-age students are registered to vote.

There is the added factor that homogenous political attitudes in the Beehive State breed boredom, according to several professors.

"You don't hear liberal or Democratic principles articulated by credible people. That makes Utah students far more apathetic than their peers in other states," Lyons says.

Furlong says college students are becoming more conservative because, as the cost of education rises, they increasingly come from the upper-middle class. And conservatives, he says, are becoming more strident about their views.

At an anti-war rally at USU before the Iraq war, 200 protesters showed up. A year later, speakers at a "peace and justice" demonstration focusing on a host of liberal causes - but primarily the war - were nearly shouted down by opponents.

Kare McManama-Kearin, a 47-year-old senior at the U., says college students are not protesting the war because the nation is still reeling from the terrorist attacks of 2001.

It would seem unpatriotic, she says. The citizen soldiers fighting in Iraq are "the everyman, the person at the end of the block. You want to support them," she says.

Mark Boman, a USU junior, is of a like mind.

"Most people here want to support the troops. They want to support the president."

Lindsay Fisher, a UVSC senior, says it is hard for her generation to get excited about the war when military campaigns - even brief skirmishes - have been common throughout her life.

"It's like we've grown up with it."

Dryer, the father of an undergraduate and two graduate students, says although students may be politically uninterested, that does not mean they do not contribute.

The percentage of students who give of their time has never been higher, he says.

"You can't say students are not interested in the world in which they live. They feel they can have more impact volunteering in a homeless shelter or working at the food bank."

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