I disagree. I cultivated a preference for the basement terminal labs while I was attending UCSD. While I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there, I never found myself wrapped up in rallies or protests or any sort of political activism.
In fact, my mother had strongly discouraged me from attending UC Berkeley, because of the politicized environment there, the protests, the drug use. I had no interest in that stuff to begin with!
I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free. I ate at the vegan cafe out in the woods. It was literally called "The Ché Café". But I literally attended no protests or rallies. If they went on, I was steering clear or unaware of them. I went to rock concerts and other stuff at the student center, so I wasn't ignorant of events there.
Furthermore, in community college, I found engagement with a diversity of student groups, and most of them weren't political. There was an Asian-Pacific Islanders group (I am not) which had social events and films and no political advocacy (because they were probably oriented towards cultural exchange as well as assimilation.) There was an entrepreneur's group, an amateur radio group, and a cybersecurity group. Yes, there was a lot of activism on campus. There were rallies and protests and art installations. But I didn't partake, and it was basically easy to cultivate friendships and networking with apolitical people.
> From my personal experience, it was hard to completely avoid them
> I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there [...] I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free.
Basically, this doesn't sound like disagreement to me. You did come across political activism, and you have some minor exposition. Granted our experience may be different, since we attended different universities at different times ; and so the magnitude of political activism was likely different. But academic freedom is a core tenet of western universities, and that means political life has always been part of campus life.
You seem to draw the limit at "attending protests", but this is an arbitrary limit. If, instead of profiling who attended the protests, the inquiry had been a network graph analysis of the commie underground, you may well have been listed.
Political rights are protected in the US. They don't have an arbitrary threshold such as "it's fine to read the commie newspaper but it's not fine to protest a topic". You draw an arbitrary limit which sets you on the good side, but what happens in reality is that this article questions whether it's fine for some government entity to draw that arbitrary line as they see fit. That's not exactly the same thing.
In fact, my mother had strongly discouraged me from attending UC Berkeley, because of the politicized environment there, the protests, the drug use. I had no interest in that stuff to begin with!
I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free. I ate at the vegan cafe out in the woods. It was literally called "The Ché Café". But I literally attended no protests or rallies. If they went on, I was steering clear or unaware of them. I went to rock concerts and other stuff at the student center, so I wasn't ignorant of events there.
Furthermore, in community college, I found engagement with a diversity of student groups, and most of them weren't political. There was an Asian-Pacific Islanders group (I am not) which had social events and films and no political advocacy (because they were probably oriented towards cultural exchange as well as assimilation.) There was an entrepreneur's group, an amateur radio group, and a cybersecurity group. Yes, there was a lot of activism on campus. There were rallies and protests and art installations. But I didn't partake, and it was basically easy to cultivate friendships and networking with apolitical people.