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Last September, after forming a chapter of Amnesty International at Florida Atlantic University, Josef Palermo and four other students attempted to rally their classmates to support United Nations intervention in Darfur, Sudan, where about 200,000 people are believed to have been killed and another 2 million displaced because of fighting among government forces, rebel groups and genocidal Janjaweed militias. On a ratty bench in a highly trafficked area of campus, they displayed information about the genocide and offered their cell phones to students to call the White House and urge President Bush to keep Darfur on the agenda when addressing the U.N. General Assembly.

"I remember how difficult it was to get [students] to stop and even look at us, let alone listen to what we had to say about stopping a humanitarian crisis," Palermo recalls. Nearly 90 students called; others said they'd be right back and never returned.

FAU's Amnesty International chapter has since grown from five members to almost 300, making it one of the most active in Florida. In March, its all-day, on-campus music fest and rally, Make Some Noise! for Darfur, drew 400 students, many of whom petitioned for U.N. action. Other campus groups such as Armenian Students Association and FAU's chapter of the National Organization for Women presented information about genocide and the systematic rapes of women and girls in Darfur.

By mid-April, Palermo and fellow student and Amnesty member Ana Halper were leading pickets and boycotts of campus vending machines to protest a $577,950 severance package they felt university president Frank Brogan had wrongly awarded to resigning chief fundraiser Lawrence Davenport.

"Students are starting to realize that they have a voice they can use," Palermo, a 23-year-old senior says. "I think it's high time for this to happen. If you walk across FAU's campus, you'll see etchings in the concrete from students in the '70s where they were protesting Spiro T. Agnew and napalm. After that, I don't know what happened. The activist component of the university just went away and, yeah, it's great to see it come back."

Ana Halper, 19, is equally pleased. "If there's anything I want to accomplish on campus, it's to generally raise awareness and get people to think about these things in their daily lives," she says, "and to care about them and realize that they can actually do something about them."

Activism comes naturally to the FAU sophomore. Born to liberal parents, she developed her sense of community involvement while frequenting coffeehouse-type spoken-word and art events at Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach. She wrote articles for the school's newspaper and the Sun-Sentinel about issues such as military recruiters' access to student files and the Palm Beach County School Board's blocking student access to human rights-based gay and lesbian Web sites while allowing access to Web sites of organizations that oppose gay rights. At 16, Halper joined Amnesty International and is now the group coordinator of the FAU chapter, replacing Palermo, who this year plans to run for a student government seat in the school's House of Representatives and continue in his role as self-appointed administrative watchdog.

In September, Palermo and Halper will present a film festival that will feature independent documentaries about human-rights issues. "We thought that would be a good way to introduce people to the stuff we're doing this year," Halper says. "In October, there will be a larger workshop on the Iraq War that's organized by a couple of professors who've asked us to do a teach-in on human-rights violations."

Also in the works is a Nov. 15 fair-trade fashion show. Before models hit the runway in sweatshop-free clothing, they'll don sweatshop garments while announcers describe the deplorable conditions in which they were made.

Halper also plans to push for a "prevention center" in the planned on-campus wellness facility. Rather than just being a gym, she explains, a wellness center should address issues such as rape, sexual harassment, depression and drug abuse and work with students to prevent such issues. She acknowledges that FAU has a medical clinic, a mental health clinic and a police station, but argues that students in crisis shouldn't have to visit three locations for the help they need.

"I protested outside President Brogan's office about Davenport's ridiculous stipend the day after Virginia Tech, and instead of talking about the issue at hand, he talked about how FAU was committed to preventing violence," Halper remembers. "If Brogan cares about the safety of FAU's students, he should allot the same $577,000 he gave Davenport to begin to fund a prevention center to ensure real wellness for our campus."

Amnesty International is but just one activist group represented at FAU. Others include Bolivarian Youth, the Peace Studies Association and the FAU Social Forum, a coalition of activists who unite on specific issues.

"Students have a negative image in the community," Palermo says. "People think of us as being lazy, apathetic, and that's simply not the case. If you approach students and frame an issue as being relevant to them, you can engage them. People will listen and they want to make a difference.

"This is only the beginning," he continues. "Now that we have opened the door for people to pay attention to human rights, we plan to get deeper into the current issues and even broaden our scope to include more controversial issues, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights and civil rights abuses related to the war on terror. It's going to be one hell of a year."