The New SDS

by E Wayne Ross on March 30, 2007

The Nation: The New SDS

Twenty-year-old Will Klatt, wearing a green knit hat, baggy jeans and black jacket pulled over a hoodie, stands before a Civil War monument at the center of Ohio University’s main campus in Athens. Although a February snow is falling steadily, more than a hundred students have turned out for this rally called by a new organization with a very familiar name: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

“Many of us at Ohio University have taken classes on the principles of democracy, on justice, on ethics,” says Klatt, “and with the presumption that we will use this knowledge, acquired in our classes, to become more informed citizens. Yet this knowledge we acquire is nothing if we do not put it into practice.”