Campus Protests Cost the Class of 1970 Its Commencement. Now Covid-19 Has Taken Away Its 50th Reunion.

In early March, Jon Andelson stood in front of his anthropology class for what he knew would be the final time this year. The semester was far from over, but Grinnell College was closing its doors, moving classes online, and sending students home to limit the spread of Covid-19.

The college hadn’t made the announcement yet, but many students rightly suspected that commencement would also be canceled. The scenario brought Andelson back 50 years, to his senior year at Grinnell, when classes were cut short and graduation was canceled.

Fifty years ago this week, student protests erupted on college campuses across the nation, including Grinnell. In late April 1970, many Americans were frustrated with the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, a neutral country, following promises to reduce forces in Southeast Asia. College students flooded their campuses in protest.

Then, on May 4, four unarmed students were fatally shot at Kent State University, in Ohio, by National Guardsmen who were monitoring an anti-Vietnam War protest. Nine other students were injured.

For many Grinnell students, including Andelson, Kent State was the “last straw.” Antiwar sentiment had been building on college campuses for years, but “things just got to a point that they couldn’t continue,” Andelson said.

The 1970 student protests were the culmination of years of frustration by students who pushed back against the era’s gender norms and advocated for racial equality. “It wasn’t just the war,” said David S. Meyer, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine who studies social movements. “There was a lot of sense that the institutions were failing.”

Grinnell students knew that activism could create change on campus. A few years earlier, students successfully advocated to integrate male and female dormitories. Across the country, students were assuming a more active role on their campuses. “We felt that we could bring change,” said Merryll Penson, a 1970 alumna.

Some Grinnell students and faculty members felt that finishing the semester as scheduled would signify an ambivalence toward Kent State and the Vietnam War. Instead, college officials should take a stand by ending the semester early. And they did. Grinnell joined a number of other American campuses in canceling classes and commencements as student activism intensified across the nation.

Now Covid-19 has forced the Class of 1970 — at Grinnell and elsewhere — to cancel another milestone: its 50th-year class reunion. “The irony is not lost on anyone,” said Nora Hoover, a 1970 alumna of Grinnell who serves as the class agent.

Boycotts and a Building Takeover

After the Kent State shooting, students across the country went on strike, boycotting their classes and encouraging their peers to do the same. An initial callout for the strike declared that “classroom education becomes a hollow, meaningless exercise” when the world is engulfed in war.

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Hoover remembers debating over dinner with friends whether she should continue attending classes. “We talked and we talked, and myself and several of my friends decided that we were not going to boycott class,” she said.

As Hoover entered a campus building for class later that week, a student stood outside, watching her menacingly. When she went to the library to study, Hoover encountered a chain of students, linked arm in arm, blocking the front entrance. She went around the building and entered through a back door, “just like it was a thief in the night,” she said.

On May 5 a group of up to 400 students met at the flagpole on campus with plans to occupy the college’s nearby Reserve Officers Training Corps building. A leader of the campus’s women’s-liberation movement called for women to lead the march across campus. By the time they reached the ROTC building, the police were waiting for them, said Bruce Nissen, a 1970 alumnus.

While Grinnell’s police chief tried to discourage students from forcibly entering the locked entrance, Nissen went to the side of the building. Students formed a human shield around him as Nissen broke through a window, entered the building, and unlocked the front door from the inside.

The students slept on the floor of the ROTC building that night. The building eventually became the headquarters of the campus’s underground newspaper, High and Mighty, which published political editorials and cartoons.

College leaders and professors at a faculty-council meeting on May 8 decided to cancel classes and commencement. The campus’s official student newspaper, The Scarlet and Black, had a reserved spot at the meeting. To determine who would cover it, the paper’s co-editors flipped a coin. Neither wanted to go, but Lloyd Gerson lost the coin toss.

Students lined up on the sidewalk leading into the auditorium where the meeting would take place. They heckled the faculty members as they walked in. Gerson was the only student allowed into the meeting. He was known by his peers for opposing some of the campus activism and felt threatened as he walked into the faculty meeting. “I really thought I was going to get a brick in the head,” he said.

The college’s dean took the lead in advocating a cancellation of classes and commencement. Many faculty members agreed, and Glenn Leggett, Grinnell’s president, seemed ambivalent, Gerson said. The faculty voted 91 to 4 to cancel the final week of classes and the commencement.

“Almost all students, from doctrinaire radicals to conservatives, have suddenly become so politically involved that they are no longer able to give proper concentration to their academic studies,” Leggett later wrote in The Scarlet and Black.

Students had five days to pack up and leave. Some vacated their dorms almost immediately, while others stuck around to continue to organize student activists. The shutdown ended much of the campus activism, which was disappointing for Nissen. It curtailed the work of the student-run Freedom School, which hosted lectures, panels, and discussion groups from a radical perspective. They taught “everything from the history of Southeast Asia to how to make a Molotov cocktail,” Andelson said.

Several alumni remember the cancellation of commencement as more of a symbolic decision than a response to an actual threat to student safety. Others believed there might be potential for campus violence.

“It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that someone would blow up a building,” Gerson said, “or even attack people on campus who didn’t agree with the very strong opposition to the war.”

While the student activism at Grinnell was relatively peaceful, students at other colleges bombed and vandalized campus buildings. The threat of violence “spooked” Leggett. “He was probably just relieved to get out of town without a bomb going off,” Gerson said.

Nissen, who belonged to Students for a Democratic Society, said the group had no plans for violence, but it planned to upend the graduation ceremony to spread an antiwar message. “We were going to disrupt that commencement ceremony,” he said. “We were going to get up on stage … and turn the whole commencement exercise into guerrilla theater.”

But violence was not beyond the realm of possibility. Nissen remembers being taken aside by a younger student who told him that he had a friend at a construction company who was willing to steal dynamite to blow up the local draft board. “We could bomb them and could really make a statement and strike a blow against the war in Vietnam,” Nissen remembers the student saying. Nissen rejected the idea. The group’s goal was to win people over, not scare them.

Only years later, after Nissen learned that another student activist had received a similar offer, did he realize that the proposition was likely to have been a trap. “There was an awful lot of attempts to infiltrate and egg on movement people to do more extreme and, ultimately, very stupid things,” he said.

Diplomas in the Mail

For Grinnell’s Class of 1970, feelings are still mixed about the canceled commencement. While many students and parents were bitterly disappointed, others felt that canceling graduation was a necessary acknowledgment of the tumult and chaos of the time.

A few professors organized a small, informal graduation ceremony before the students left. A handful of seniors donned caps and gowns to participate. For the rest, “the college mailed us our diplomas, and that was the end of it,” Andelson said.

Over the years, members of the class debated how to make up for the canceled commencement. They considered holding a ceremony at their 25th class reunion, but a majority voted down that option. Andelson was one of the “no” votes. For him, Grinnell’s canceled graduation represents the turmoil that consumed college campuses in the spring of 1970, Vietnam War opposition, and the arrival of a more progressive age.

Trying to replace the ceremony 25 years later simply missed the point. “I wanted the canceled commencement in 1970 to continue to be the main message,” he said.

So instead of staging a graduation, the Class of 1970 planted a grove of trees on the campus. Students, faculty members, and campus visitors can sit and think at Grinnell’s Peace Grove.

Another Milestone Canceled

The decision to call off the 50th reunion surprised no one. It would have brought the Grinnell alums, now in their early 70s, into close quarters for a long weekend in June.

“You’re in the dormitories, you’re staying next door to people,” said Chris Meyer, the fund director for the Class of 1970 and a member of Grinnell’s Alumni Council. “So it’s the same sort of petri dish that everybody worries about for old-age homes or cruise ships.”

The reunion has been rescheduled for next year, when it will be held jointly with that of the Class of 1971. The 50th reunion typically draws more graduates than other years, Meyer said. He had hopes that about 100 of his classmates would return for it.

“We’re now at the point where we are regularly losing members from our class. I know that there’s going to be somebody in the next 12 months who’s going to pass away,” Meyer said. “And that’s the thing that makes me saddest about the cancellation.”

Several alumni said it’s difficult to draw parallels between 1970 and today. Unlike members of the Class of 1970, this year’s seniors “weren’t protesting anything,” Andelson said. “They had no agency in this decision. It was a decision made well beyond their sphere of influence.”

However, the gaps and inequalities exposed by Covid-19 within higher education and politics have the potential to spawn a wave of activism like the protests that engulfed campuses in 1970, Nissen said.

But the thing that most strongly links the experiences of the Class of 1970 and the Class of 2020 is also the most obvious, said Meyer. They both missed their graduations, a milestone that traditionally allows students to close out their college experience in a tangible way.

“A commencement is an event that marks a transition in your life. It’s a milepost,” Meyer said. “I don’t think the Class of 2020 really recognizes it yet, but this will have a continuing impact.”