For Mark Coven '72 only the wardrobe has changed.
An antiwar activist at the time of the Vietnam War, he now wears the robes of a state trial court judge in Massachusetts.
Although it might seem ironic that a man with an arrest record ended up behind the judicial bench, Coven sees his progression as nothing more than an extension of the same battle he has been fighting for more than a quarter of a century.
Coven and approximately thirty other students regularly challenged
the Union student body, faculty, and administration to ask the same questions being asked on campuses across the country.
“What was happening was
not just a challenge to government policy, but also a questioning of the values and the type of college we wanted to be,” he says.
Coven helped organize marches, demonstrations, and student strikes in the name of educational freedom and a participatory system of rule; the College created both an all-College senate and appointed a student member to the Board of Trustees.
“For a small school, Union was a very dynamic place in those years,” he says.
Part of what made the school dynamic, he says, was strong conservative opposition from students and faculty to what was seen as liberal causes. It was, Coven says, “conservative opposition in the best sense of the word. There was principled disagreement, rational discourse, arguments, and intellectual challenges. It was not hostile acrimony.”
Today, from his chambers in Somerville, Massachusetts, Coven insists that “there is not a major difference between accepting responsibility by doing civil disobedience to draw attention to issues you feel are important and trying to enhance the moral fabric of the country through your rulings as a judge.”
It is a statement not every antiwar protester could get away with. After all, Jerry Rubin raised more than a few eyebrows as a successful investment banker during the 1980s.
But Coven has more than earned his credibility. His career of service has brought him from the desegregation cases in Georgia in the 1970s to a lawsuit against President Ronald Reagan and the federal
government over social security benefits for the elderly during the 1980s.
In fact, Coven began fighting for
the rights of the less fortunate as a student when he helped organize both a food cooperative and a poverty rights office in Schenectady. He spent his college summers organizing tenants and welfare recipients in Atlanta and returned to Georgia during law school to pick up the desegregation fight. After
a clerkship with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and a stint as the legislative director for New Hampshire Senator John Durkin, Coven returned to Massachusetts, where he
organized a
legal services program for the elderly in Boston and in the Berkshires. “After being in the belly of the beast I wanted
to return to a community and become actively involved,” he says
His work earned him a spot Governor Michael Dukakis's administration as assistant
secretary for human services. In 1986, Coven moved to the attorney general's office, serving as deputy
attorney general,
before becoming a judge in 1989.
He hears both civil and criminal cases
and says he enjoys a diverse caseload that forces him to deal with some of the most serious problems facing the country, such as domestic violence and child abuse.
“There is not a day that goes by that I feel ineffective,” he says. °I love the intellectual challenge, and I also feel I can intervene and help the lives of some very troubled people.”
According to Coven, that kind of intervention is where the spirit of the antiwar movement endures on today's campuses. Just because there isn't a war or an overriding national issue to protest doesn't mean students have become apathetic, he says. “There are lots of outlets for community involvement and students doing all kinds of worthwhile things. There may not be major demonstrations, but I don't think there's any less concern with social action.”
The liberal in Coven, who believes in the government's ability to help people through its dedication to justice, says he tries not to get too disheartened about the recent shift to the political right.
“I'm patient enough to realize that the government has its ebbs and flows and like a pendulum ultimately returns to the center.”