The New Student Activism - NYTimes.com ASHLEY WARD, an aspiring idealist with waning faith in the world, was standing in the newsroom of her college paper at Humboldt State University in Northern California when a fellow student rushed in with startling news. Three thousand miles due east, on a tiny patch of Lower Manhattan, people were camping out to protest Wall Street, decrying its stranglehold on politics and continuing enrichment as the economy flatlined. It was the first that Ms. Ward, then a senior, had heard of Occupy Wall Street, and as she learned more about it, her heart glowed. "I've been waiting for something to happen for years," she said. I was personally starting to get afraid that something like this wouldn't happen in my lifetime. She and a friend resolved to bring Occupy to their campus. They printed fliers, set up a Web site and blasted out e-mails. They told as many people as they could about their action plan. On Oct. 1, they held a sprawling, consensus-style meeting on campus, a version of the general assemblies being held in Zuccotti Park in New York, and set up tents. And thus was born one of the first Occupy Wall Street college protests. Occupy protests rapidly sprouted at other campuses: hundreds nationwide currently have or had some sort of Occupy-related activity going on. Mirroring the broader movement, students have taken aim at widening income disparities and the cozy symbiosis between Washington and Wall Street. But the college occupiers have also embraced a panoply of causes, localizing and personalizing their protests in a way that has lent an immediacy and urgency to their outcries. At Tufts, students have used the attention garnered by Occupy to advance a decades-long push for an Africana studies department. At Occupy Pocatello, Idaho State University students are condemning Idaho's high foreclosure rate from a handful of pup tents as well as more wind-resistant cardboard boxes. At Yale, a traditional feeder school for investment banks and hedge funds, students noisily protested a Morgan Stanley information session in the fall. Recruiting visits to Harvard, Princeton and Cornell have been similarly disrupted. "I'm not sure it would've happened if Occupy Wall Street wouldn't have started," said Marina Keegan, of the Morgan Stanley protest at Yale, where she is a senior. Definitely people are starting to think more critically about their choices after graduation and how they affect not just themselves, but the world. All of which sets Occupy-related student protests apart from much of the campus activism that has come before. A good chunk of student protest has focused on single issues: nukes in the "70s, apartheid and Contras in the "80s, sweatshops in the "90s. Many of today's new graduates find themselves heavily indebted, and to the same institutions that received multibillion-dollar bailouts in the financial crash. Median income is stagnant. Their public universities are underfinanced, and class sizes growing. College activists have linked these issues to broad critiques of the financial-political complex. "What you have with the Occupy movement is a criticism of global capitalism and the American financial system, but also a critique of policing on campus, tuition policy, the way universities are run," said Angus Johnston, a historian who teaches at the City University of New York. "That is certainly resonant with the movements of the "60s, because student activism of the 1960s connected up major national and global issues and campus policy." While students as recently as 2009 were taking over campus buildings - across California and in New York, at the New School - Occupy has drawn a wider swath. Previously apolitical students have been drawn by personal woes - their parents" vanishing 401 (k) "s, their fears of the job market. "This has been a catalyst for getting more students involved," said Anne Wolfe, 20, a junior at Tufts who is working with protesters at Boston University and camped out at Occupy Boston. "We're able to get out of our own college bubble," she said. At Humboldt, students set their tents back up after winter break. The campus has embraced the protests: the Associated Students, a council representing students, gave their full endorsement of the occupiers. Ms. Ward said communitywide Occupy meetings were being held indoors, and expects the core people to remain involved for the long haul. But she also expects attendance to wane. "We have a generation that believes instant gratification is the only form of gratification," Ms. Ward said. This is something that's going to take a long time. Cara Buckley is a metropolitan reporter for The Times.