50 Years of Images

Dennis Brack, Black Star, for The Chronicle

Campuses Calm as Students Join 2 War Protests

A Washington statue shouldered one protester’s message as hundreds of thousands of his colleagues marched in Washington against the Vietnam War. The national effort, one student leader said, was “draining the best organizers” from many campuses.

Just Hangin’ Out

Streakers, perhaps celebrating the arrival of spring, drew a crowd at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where, chill or no, the fad made itself apparent that season. On dozens of campuses, The Chronicle reported, “there were single streaks, mixed-double streaks, and numerous attempts to set records for mass streaking.”

Stuart Franklin, Magnum Photos

Defiance and Death in Beijing

When the Chinese government’s bloody suppression of protesters began at Tiananmen Square, a Chronicle reporter, Robert F. Jacobson, was interviewing students at nearby Beijing University. Word of the massacre soon reached the campus. “Something very bad has happened,” said a physics instructor who arrived by bicycle. Soon after, an activist who had escaped the army’s assault said, “Before, everything was so complicated. Now it is so simple.”

Talking Heads From Academe

Jerrold M. Post, a political psychologist at George Washington University who submitted to repeated interviews during the Persian Gulf war about his study of Saddam Hussein, wrote about the scholarly risks of letting journalists dictate the agenda. “One cannot provide a complex analysis in a series of 28-second sound bites,” he wrote. The essay’s illustrator, James Yang, proceeded accordingly.

Secularism 
in the Elimination Round

To illustrate a review of Christopher Hitchens’s book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Steve Brodner offers up the author as an atheist crusader. In Hitchens’s book, writes Jacques Berlinerblau, “all religions are seen as equally depraved.”

Photograph by Steve Pyke for The Chronicle

The Images Dancing 
in David Gelernter’s Head

Sixteen years earlier, a package from the 
Unabomber blew apart the Yale computer-
science professor’s world. That’s when he 
found his polymathic, political, artistic self.

Photo by Greg Kahn for The Chronicle

Each Called By Name

Earle Briggs Wilson III graduates from Prince George’s Community College. “I kind of thought this didn’t happen for people like me,” he told The Chronicle’s Eric Hoover and Sara Lipka in their moving account of the ceremony and the lives of some of the people who were there.

Photo by Joey Pulone for The Chronicle

In the Land of Tests, the ‘Exam Dream’ Comes in Many Guises

More than a few nightmares originate in classrooms, as Eric Hoover described in an article about academic anxiety. William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College, is among those who acknowledges waking up from dreams in which he’s a student who has forgotten to write a paper.

Deconstructing Paul De Man

Making words themselves crucial to his illustration, David Plunkert led off Carlin Romano’s review of a biography of Paul De Man, philosopher and scoundrel. How, Romano asked, should a scholar’s ethics affect our reading of his work?

NYU Eats World: An Alumna Laments the Rise of an Imperial University

For Claudia Dreifus’s critique of what she saw as New York University’s costly hubris — “the very model of the modern, inflating mega-university,” she called it — the illustrator Melinda Beck made the most of violet, the school color.

Illustration by Tim Cook for The Chronicle

The Lost, Secret History of Reading

Reversing the decline of the humanities, wrote Arthur Melzer, may require something never contemplated in debates on the subject: “recovering the forgotten art of esoteric interpretation, of reading between the lines.”

Brian Davidson, Getty Images

Shake-Up at U. of Missouri

The fervor of antiracism protests at the University of Missouri, gaining national attention, led to the resignations of the system’s president and the flagship’s chancellor.

Photo by Thomas Patterson, The New York Times, Redux

Lasting Furor Over Rape

Two students got tattoos as reminders of their use of Title IX to file a federal complaint against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over its response to allegations of rape. Students were beginning to wield the federal anti-gender-bias law as a weapon to demand that colleges strengthen their policies against sexual assault.

50 Years of The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Chronicle’s story has been about being in the right place at the right time. It’s our ambition to continue that narrative in the decades to come.