May 20, 1968
Campus Protest Movements Take New Tack at Columbia
By James W. Brann
New York
In the turmoil at Columbia University this spring are signs that new factors are being injected into campus protest movements.
These two aspects of the Columbia confrontation have special significance:
- The hard-core activist students who launched the protest care little about resolving the announced issues — halting construction of a new gymnasium and reconstructing the decision-making apparatus at Columbia and the university’s relationships with society. The leaders of Columbia’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society view the seizure of Columbia buildings, as well as the resulting student strike, as a mechanism to educate students and the public to what they call “the corrupt and exploitative” nature of American society.
- Faculty members have been moved into a position of attempting reluctantly to mediate and to serve as a buffer between opposing forces.
Some accounts of the faculty involvement describe the professors as naïve do-gooders who got in the way of a hard line confrontation and settlement between the students and the university administration. Others picture the faculty as a hard-driving group eager to grasp the reins of power from an embattled administration and board of trustees.
“We were neither,” explains Professor Walter P. Metzger, an authority on American intellectual history. “Our aim was to generate support for the moderate position among the students, to create a center.”
“If the faculty is perceived as a bunch of nincompoops or power-seekers,” says Mr. Metzger, its role in power struggles at other institutions will be greatly diminished.
James W. Brann, a Chronicle reporter, went on to teach journalism at Boston University for 24 years.
September 2, 1968
War, Political Frustration, Race Issues Presage Deeper Student Unrest
A ll indicators point to more and deeper student dissidence on many campuses in the coming academic year.
Events of the summer, agree most persons close to the activist student movements, have only served to intensify the students’ disenchantment with their lot — not only in their colleges and universities — but in society generally.
Last week’s events in Chicago, both in the Democrats’ choice of what many students consider the “organization” candidate and in the actions of police against young demonstrators in the city streets, were regarded by many student activists as the final proof that working with the “system” is no way to bring about the forms they desperately desire.
May 5, 1969
Response to Armed Negroes Divides Cornell Community
By James W. Brann
Ithaca, N.Y.
T he sight of armed Negro students leaving a campus building after a 36-hour occupation has created an atmosphere of tension and resulted in bitter debate and recrimination at Cornell University.
The Cornell crisis attracted national attention when about 100 Negro students occupied Willard Straight Hall, the student center, at 6:20 a.m. Saturday, April 19. They ousted sleeping parents (it was a parents’ weekend) and seized the campus radio station in the building.
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The Negro students left the building 36 hours later, after Robert D. Miller, dean of the faculty, had promised he would recommend that the faculty nullify its reprimands against three Negro students involved in earlier demonstrations against the university’s “slowness” in creating a black studies program.
The faculty rejected the agreement the following day, but reversed itself two days later.
That turnabout was followed by the resignations of the chairman of the departments of government and history, and of Professor Walter F. Berns of the government department, this year’s winner of a Cornell distinguished teaching award.
September 15, 1969
Conservative Students Lay Plan to ‘Sock It to the Left’
By Malcolm G. Scully
St. Louis
Taking as its slogan, “Sock It to the Left,” the nation’s largest organization of conservative students — the Young Americans for Freedom — has mapped plans to confront the student left legally and, if necessary, physically during the coming academic year.
But even as such plans were being formulated at the YAF convention here, the organization faced challenges from dissidents of its own — a group of about 20 percent of the 730 delegates who argued that the state and its growing influence, rather than student radicals, should be the major target of YAF activities.
In all, YAF claims about 51,000 members in more than 500 chapters.
Among the dissidents, who called themselves libertarians, was a small group of anarchists — one of whom brought uproar to the convention when he burned what was allegedly a facsimile of his draft card during the floor debate.
Malcolm G. Scully arrived as a reporter in 1967 and served in a variety of editorial positions, including editor at large, before retiring as editor of The Chronicle Review in 2007.
February 24, 1970
At Berkeley, Where It All Began, Activism Has Become a Way of Life
By Philip W. Semas
Berkeley. Calif.
At noon on Friday on the University of California campus here, a girl stood on the steps of Sproul Hall and talked over a loudspeaker about women’s liberation.
Only about a dozen of the thousands of passing students stopped to listen.
Nor did the students pay much attention to the card tables set up in front of the student union across the plaza. There supporters of the Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, the boycott of California table grapes, and the Radical Student Union tried to give away or sell literature, solicit funds, and occasionally argue with a passer-by.
A few feet away, at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues, Hubert Lindsay was teaching. “Holy Hubert,” as he is known to his fans, is a gap-toothed, freckle-faced fundamentalist preacher who debates daily with students. The debates are mostly entertainment for the students, who scream questions and insults and then laugh as Hubert tells them “You’re all sinners” or “You’ve got a dirty heart.” He had the largest crowd on the plaza: about 50 people.
That Friday scene, a fairly typical one at Berkeley these days, shows how many things have changed since the Free Speech Movement here in 1964.
Philip W. Semas came to The Chronicle as a reporter in 1969 and retired as editor in chief in 2013. He started The Chronicle of Philanthropy in 1988.
May 25, 1970
Kent State ‘Is Where It Happened — It Must Never Happen Again’
By Philip W. Semas
Kent, Ohio
Those now on the Kent State campus — primarily faculty members and administrators — seem less concerned with fixing blame for the killings than with finding ways for the university to recover.
“This is certainly not a time for finger-pointing or for decisions based on guilt, which all of us share,” says Robert E. Matson, vice-president for student affairs. “We need a rational return to a commitment to reason, which will necessitate an end to polarization. That’s what we need if we’re going to turn our efforts to reconstruction, which implies change as well as a return to those values.”
“Kent State — of all places — can’t let the deaths of four young people be lost in the rhetoric of finger-pointing,” Mr. Matson says. “It ought to be able to contribute something to the best side of human values.”
September 28, 1970
Faculty and Students Fearful and Confused After Fatal Bombing at U. of Wisconsin
By Philip W. Semas
Madison, Wis.
As classes began last week at the University of Wisconsin, “fear” and “confusion” were the words most often used by administrators, professors, and students to describe the state of their campus.
In August, after four years of protest accompanied by escalating violence on the part of both students and police, a bomb that was intended to destroy the Army Mathematics Research Center exploded in a parking lot, killing a graduate student and doing $2.7-million in damage to the center and nearby buildings.
The fear on the campus is of two kinds.
One, expressed mostly by administrators and professors, is that radical violence may make scholarship impossible.
The other fear, expressed mostly by students but also by some faculty members, is that the university faces a wave of repression and official violence from the university regents and state officials.
The confusion is over what the effect of the bombing will be on the future course of radical activity on the campus.
December 6, 1971
Jackson State, Scene of Killings, Tries to Shake Haunts of Past
By William A. Sievert and Jacqueline J. Adams
Jackson, Miss.
The killings still loom large in the memories of everyone who was on the campus that May 15, and you have to search to find anyone who is not convinced the shootings were acts of outright murder by city policemen and highway patrolmen who entered the campus to quell rock-throwing by about 100 students.
Police fired more than 400 rounds of bullets and pellets into Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, and the surrounding area, killing James Earl Green, a high school senior, and Philip L. Gibbs, a senior at Jackson State. Another dozen persons were wounded, 11 of them students.
Most of the people you meet at Jackson State today are resigned to the fact that the only reason their campus is “on the map” at all is that their “incident” followed by only 11 days the killing of four white students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Students point out that a similar incident on their campus in which another youth, Benjamin Brown, was shot to death by police in 1967 stirred not a ripple of national outrage.
But most of the people at Jackson State this fall seem to feel it is useless to dwell on the past.
“They’ve forgotten all about it,” says Mary Gibbs, sister of the slain Phillip Gibbs, as she gestures to the small groups of students hurrying across the campus. “And I don’t like to bring it up, either.”
William A. Sievert was a reporter and editor at The Chronicle from 1970-80. Jacqueline J. Adams was an editorial intern in 1971. She became a broadcast journalist for CBS.
March 13, 1972
Who Are/Were Those Kids And Why Do/Did They Do Those Awful/Wonderful Things?
By Malcolm G. Scully
By the end of 1971, there had been more than 100 empirical studies of student activists. Out of that vast research has emerged a relatively consistent picture of their numbers and their background. Beyond that, however, much of the data can be and has been interpreted in a variety of ways.
And the apparently dwindling intensity of the movement after the nationwide protests against the U.S. incursions into Cambodia in the spring of 1970 has posed new questions for the theorists of student revolt.
What we do know is that the percentage of students who called themselves “radical” rose during the late 1960s, but has begun to decline again since the Cambodian incursions.
November 27, 1972
Southern U. — Tragedy on a Tortured Campus
Slaying of 2 Youths in Louisiana Deepens a Long-Festering Distrust Between Students, Administrators
By Edward R. Weidlein
Baton Rouge, La.
It is still almost impossible to pinpoint who killed the two students. It is even more difficult to offer any logical explanation of the events of Nov. 16, or how differences between administrators and students could get so out of control.
Many of Southern’s faculty members and some of its students live less than a mile from the university, in an area of East Baton Rouge Parish with neatly laid-out houses, some of them rather opulent, some lacking any pretension. Their neighbors are Baton Rouge’s black lawyers, black physicians, and other black professionals.
In one of those houses, at 7340 Yorkshire, Frederick J. Prejean was rousted out of bed at 4 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 6, by sheriff’s deputies armed with a warrant for his arrest. The warrant had been requested by G. Leon Netterville, Jr., president of Southern University.
Mr. Prejean, a 26-year-old senior in accounting, is a chief spokesman for “Students United,” a group of Southern students who brought a series of grievances before the university administration in mid-October. The students asked for a role in university governance and curricular changes, among other things. They followed their statement of grievances with boycotts of classes when the administration did not respond as the students wished.
News of the arrest of Mr. Prejean and three other students spread quickly. By the time he got to his office that morning, Mr. Netterville found several dozen students in the administration building. They wanted to know why the students had been arrested and requested that they be released.
Mr. Netterville left his office, reportedly to go to a scheduled meeting with the state board of education in downtown Baton Rouge.
Sometime after he left, the head of Southern’s security force “acting in my behalf,” according to Mr. Netterville, put in a call to sheriff’s deputies. For almost a month, off and on, they had been alerted for duty at Southern. The security officer asked that they come onto the campus to remove the students from the administration building.
Meanwhile, a crowd estimated at one-third of the 9,000 students on the Baton Rouge campus was gathering near the administration building.
Police massed outside the building. From somewhere a canister, first thought to be a smoke grenade and later said to be tear gas, was thrown onto the ground. Police fired more tear gas, some of it from shotguns.
When the gas cleared, Denver A. Smith and Leonard D. Brown lay dead.
Edward R. Weidlein came to The Chronicle as a reporter in 1971 and held a variety of editorial positions until he retired, in 2014. He edited our first opinion pages and our books and arts coverage in the 1970s.
October 23, 1973
The ‘New’ Scholars: A Special Report
The ferment of the 1960s has created a climate of profound change in American scholarship
By Malcolm G. Scully
O n the surface, at least, the heady radicalism that prevailed among some students and in some scholarly associations in the late 1960s has subsided, and colleges and universities appear to be functioning normally again.
Yet the radical scholars of the ’60s and the questions they raised about their academic disciplines have created a climate of profound change in American scholarship.
In virtually every discipline, as a result of internal evolution and external pressures, a new scholarship has emerged — a scholarship that rejects many of the orthodoxies of the past and offers new ideologies and methodologies to students who are beginning their careers as scholars.
The radicals themselves, who took over meetings of the American Sociological Association, who elected two of their own kind to be presidents of the Modern Language Association, and who turned stodgy business meetings into bitter political confrontations, are now less vocal, hence less visible, than even two years ago.
Some radicals have left the academic world to practice what they have preached. Many of those who have remained are, as one says, “trying to be twice as good scholars as our colleagues so we can keep our jobs.”
