Activists in the Country Club
Political Activism at Northwestern in the 1960's
by Britt Gordon-McKeon
Step out onto Deering Meadow one of these days, close your eyes, and let yourself imagine what it felt like to be standing in that very spot on a day in May nearly 35 years ago. Let yourself feel the bodies pressing in all around you, the whispering and the shouting, the energy in the air. Look around at your fellow students, 5,000 strong, gathering together in this place because all of you feel so strongly about what is happening in your country and your world, and you want to find ways to individually and collectively act on your beliefs. Six days ago, you learned that Richard Nixon, after promising that the country was finally on its way to peace in Vietnam, had ordered American troops to invade Cambodia. Yesterday, you learned that four students at Kent State University were killed by the National Guard during a protest of that invasion. And today, you and 5,000 of your fellow students have come to vote on whether Northwestern University, like hundreds of other schools around the nation, should shut down.
People take their turns at the microphone, making impassioned speeches. People plead for calm, and people demand action. A group of students from Kent State who've traveled to Chicago speak about what happened on their campus. By the end of the night, you've voted on and passed overwhelmingly: the shutdown of Northwestern University indefinitely; the declaration of "The Free State of Northwestern," independent from the United States and repudiating its foreign policy; a call for the university to send a Northwestern delegation to Washington DC to express the views of the University community; and complete disclosure of all the University's investments and the sale of all war-related stocks. Within a few days, students and faculty begin to talk about turning Northwestern into a New University, where classes without grades will be taught collaboratively by students and faculty sharing their experiences, and where courses will attempt "to recognize the relationship between academics and politics in the University."
Over the next week, students spend days going door to door in Evanston talking to residents about the war. They stage demonstrations by standing side by side along Evanston streets by the hundreds. They rip down the heavy fences around the campus and use them to create a barricade across Sheridan Road near the Arch, shutting down the street for days and making it a site for bonfires and a short-lived attempt at a garden. Northwestern students are part of a 150,000-strong protest in Washington DC that leads President Nixon to fear revolution and post soldiers with machine guns around the White House. And when you finally vote to end the strike on May 13, classes and grades become optional, so that students who choose to may continue "working on the strike."
"Wait," you say skeptically, opening your eyes in 2004 and letting the misty visions of the past dissipate. "Why dwell on the past of so many years ago? That was the Sixties! How is it possibly relevant to the quiet, apathetic Northwestern of today? That was a completely different time."
An understandable reaction, but bear with me. Close your eyes one more time, and let yourself slip back to the past again. You stand on that crowded, grassy field as a senior, member of the Class of 1970.
But when you entered Northwestern, in the fall of 1966, if someone had tried to tell you that you'd see activism and protest and dissent come alive at Northwestern before you graduated, you would have laughed.
That sort of thing happened at schools like Berkeley and Michigan, not at Northwestern, the "Country Club of the North Shore." Not at Northwestern, where the wealthiest families in the Midwest sent their daughters and sons. Not at Northwestern, where the sophomore class the year you entered school included just five black students. Not at Northwestern, where half of men were in fraternities and two-thirds of women were in sororities, most of which included no blacks or Jews.
You were entering a school where women would be turned away from the dining halls unless they were wearing a skirt or dress; where women who stayed out past their 10 p.m. curfew could be denied the privilege of going out on weekend evenings or could even be suspended from classes; where it was against the rules for men and women to enter each others' dorm rooms.
Yet things were changing, even during your first year. The admissions department had expanded financial aid and begun aggressively recruiting lower and middle class students and blacks, starting with you, the Class of 1970, and every year the campus would get a little more diverse. Students for a Democratic Society, a small and relatively quiet student group which had drawn little attention from the student body since its founding in 1965, began to grow in size and become more active, and by late spring of 1967, drew 2,000 to their anti-war teach-in, although the event was strongly criticized for being "one-sided." That same spring, a student named Ellis Pines emerged as a candidate for president of the Student Senate on the platform of "Student Power"; a week later, he had defeated the "serious candidates" and won the election. He drew hundreds to his rallies, which he called "bitch-ins," in which he collected student grievances and led marches to the administration buildings. But when at one Student Power rally an American flag was displayed upside-down, the backlash against Pines and his movement was furious, and within a month of its creation, Student Power was disbanded.
When you came back to Evanston in fall 1967 as a sophomore, you learned that University President J. Roscoe Miller had declared the past spring's trial of parietal hours (in which a few hours a week were opened up to allow men and women to spend time together in their dorm rooms) a failure — parents and alumni had complained, and so they were once again forbidden. Students were outraged; several dorms declared themselves "autonomous living units," and the Student Senate issued an ultimatum to Miller, to which he acquiesced in less than a month. By your senior year, nearly all of these restrictive in loco parentis rules would be gone.
Most students were focused on these sorts of issues, but Students for a Democratic Society and other groups continued to grow and to keep issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War in the student body's attention. In February 1968, SDS organized a protest of Dow Chemical, producer of napalm, recruiting on Northwestern's campus. The demonstration drew 500 students, who gathered at the recuitment site and then made an unscheduled detour to the administration buildings.
As the Daily Northwestern reported the next day, "The message, as the leaders of the demonstration put it, was 'We have to look at our own lives and see how we contribute to this system. Then we must organize and redirect the uses of this university.'" Yet after the high-visibility protest was over, most of the students returned to their daily lives, and SDS returned to a largely quiet state.
In the face of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots across the country, and increasing black student activism, black students at Northwestern seized the moment in spring 1968, issuing demands and then beginning a sit-in at the bursar's office on May 3.
110 of the 120 black students on campus were involved in the sit-in and won many of their demands, including a University commitment to admit black students in proportion to their percentage of the population (including an emphasis on recruiting poor blacks), the creation of an African American studies program, and the creation of the Black House. It was during this time that an Ohio State student wrote to her friend at Northwestern: "It has completely surprised everyone down here to learn that the most apathetic school in the Big Ten is finally doing something."
But the administration's decision to negotiate with the black students received scathing criticism from alumni, trustees, and the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, and it became clear that it was extremely unlikely that the administration would be so "soft" on protests again.
The summer of 1968 saw Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's death, violent clashes between demonstrators and police at the Democrats' presidential convention in Chicago, and the Democrats' nomination of sitting Vice-President Hubert Humphrey over anti-war candidates including Eugene McCarthy. That fall, when you returned to campus for your junior year, SDS was drawing more interest than ever — over 100 people showed up at the first meeting of the year — but they did little to capitalize on this committment, at least in terms of reaching out to the larger community. They began to make statements to the Daily Northwestern about their belief that "the system" uses demonstrations as a catharsis and that "probably the days of peaceful demonstrations on college campuses are nearly over." As the elections neared and anti-war protesters met Humphrey at nearly every campaign stop, Northwestern's SDS ran a "Don't Vote" drive, and in November, Richard Nixon was elected President with a slim lead in the popular vote but a more decisive electoral win.
The following spring, when black students entered the Triangle fraternity house in response to a brother's treatment of a black woman, they caused significant property damage. The discipline process for these students became a cause of great concern on campus, culminating in a long hunger strike of black students and white sympathizers. The hunger strikers were barely acknowledged, let alone taken seriously, by the administration.
Soon after, a small-scale non-violent SDS demonstration during ROTC drills on Deering resulted in a harsh disciplinary crackdown which ignored abundant eyewitness testimony and resulted in the suspension of one student from Northwestern for a full year, a punishment that left him vulnerable to the draft and infuriated students. The next week, 600 students were involved in disrupting ROTC classes. Yet finals were beginning and the end of the school year was near, and interest in the issue dissipated over the summer.
The following school year saw burgeoning student interest in a wide variety of issues, from women's liberation, to student and faculty representation on the Board of Trustees, to activism around pollution and the environment (including calls for University divestment from companies for environmental reasons), to a movement to abolish grades at Northwestern — most of these largely separate from the efforts of radical students on campus. SDS, instead, was caught up in internal conflict and was becoming increasingly radical; that summer, the national group had splintered into a number of factions, including the Weather Underground. The main contributions of SDS at Northwestern were a series of ultimatums to the administration in December; these were not taken seriously by most other students, let alone administrators, and a January attack to damage the building where ROTC held classes.
And then, on April 30, President Nixon announced that the US had invaded Cambodia, and students at Northwestern and across the nation protested. And after four students were killed at Kent State Universitiy on May 4, Northwestern — like hundreds of other colleges and universities across the country — shut down. Day after day, thousands of students poured into Deering Meadow to talk and listen and vote on proposals, and then flowed out into the streets of Evanston. 7,000 students trekked up to one rally at the football stadium that week. Formally dressed and genuinely bewildered Trustees sat in dorms and Greek houses to talk with students about their thoughts and feelings. The National Guard was called in by Evanston officials. Suddenly at Northwestern, anything seemed possible.
Yet as you return to the present, you might not want to forget that the stories of Northwestern 35 years ago bring not only hope, but warnings and wisdom. Because for all the sound and fury, for all of the suprising support for a radical restructuring of the university, the reality was that in 1970, not much changed. Much time and focus was channelled into planning a summer bus tour in which students would speak to people nationwide about the strike, which fell through for lack of funds; and a proposal for classes to be cancelled for the two weeks before the November elections each year, which was debated by faculty and administrators well into the summer and eventually rejected.
Sure, grades became optional for Spring Quarter 1970, but in the fall grading and classes had returned to the way they always were. Yes, trustees eventually made the university's stockholdings public, but the listings were simply passed along to the new student Stock Portfolio Advisory Commitee for study, and discussions of divestment faded away. The much heralded transformation of Northwestern into a New University was wished for by most students, but those students lacked the ideology, commitment, and understanding to carry those efforts forward.
And one group which had the potential to help transform that energy and enthusiasm into radical thought and proposals for concrete change, SDS, was largely disconnected from the strike. Their ever-growing radicalization over the past several years had created a gap between the activists and mainstream students. In fall 1969 in their short-lived publication Potempkin, they were writing things like: "Organizing on a college campus such as Northwestern where most of the students are part of the pig anyway doesn't make as much sense as getting things accomplished on that campus in solidarity with the oppressed masses of the world . . . The fear of alienating potential members no longer makes sense at NU where there are no new potential members," and "SDS must be ready for militant action . . . KICK THE ASS OF THE RULING CLASS; ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE WORKER! OFF ROTC AT ALL COST!" Once the strike began, SDS seemed both unwilling and unable to attempt to breach the growing gap between them and mainstream students, instead choosing actions such as ransacking ROTC offices.
The May strike turned out to be, on the whole, a genuinely mainstream endeavor at Northwestern. It was a remarkable opening, in which the majority of students on campus began, practically overnight for most, to see themselves as part of "the movement." But no one seized the moment to suggest new and radical ways of thinking and acting to these thousands of energized students. Most students' feelings and thoughts were never pushed beyond the superficial, and the atmosphere dissipated more quickly than it had come, never again to be recaptured. Just a few months later, with the new school year, most students fell back into the old familiar patterns they were so accustomed to, and the crazy days and weeks of the previous spring felt like a dream. No one seemed to understand how it had ever happened at a place like Northwestern.
by Britt Gordon-McKeon
Step out onto Deering Meadow one of these days, close your eyes, and let yourself imagine what it felt like to be standing in that very spot on a day in May nearly 35 years ago. Let yourself feel the bodies pressing in all around you, the whispering and the shouting, the energy in the air. Look around at your fellow students, 5,000 strong, gathering together in this place because all of you feel so strongly about what is happening in your country and your world, and you want to find ways to individually and collectively act on your beliefs. Six days ago, you learned that Richard Nixon, after promising that the country was finally on its way to peace in Vietnam, had ordered American troops to invade Cambodia. Yesterday, you learned that four students at Kent State University were killed by the National Guard during a protest of that invasion. And today, you and 5,000 of your fellow students have come to vote on whether Northwestern University, like hundreds of other schools around the nation, should shut down.
People take their turns at the microphone, making impassioned speeches. People plead for calm, and people demand action. A group of students from Kent State who've traveled to Chicago speak about what happened on their campus. By the end of the night, you've voted on and passed overwhelmingly: the shutdown of Northwestern University indefinitely; the declaration of "The Free State of Northwestern," independent from the United States and repudiating its foreign policy; a call for the university to send a Northwestern delegation to Washington DC to express the views of the University community; and complete disclosure of all the University's investments and the sale of all war-related stocks. Within a few days, students and faculty begin to talk about turning Northwestern into a New University, where classes without grades will be taught collaboratively by students and faculty sharing their experiences, and where courses will attempt "to recognize the relationship between academics and politics in the University."
Over the next week, students spend days going door to door in Evanston talking to residents about the war. They stage demonstrations by standing side by side along Evanston streets by the hundreds. They rip down the heavy fences around the campus and use them to create a barricade across Sheridan Road near the Arch, shutting down the street for days and making it a site for bonfires and a short-lived attempt at a garden. Northwestern students are part of a 150,000-strong protest in Washington DC that leads President Nixon to fear revolution and post soldiers with machine guns around the White House. And when you finally vote to end the strike on May 13, classes and grades become optional, so that students who choose to may continue "working on the strike."
"Wait," you say skeptically, opening your eyes in 2004 and letting the misty visions of the past dissipate. "Why dwell on the past of so many years ago? That was the Sixties! How is it possibly relevant to the quiet, apathetic Northwestern of today? That was a completely different time."
An understandable reaction, but bear with me. Close your eyes one more time, and let yourself slip back to the past again. You stand on that crowded, grassy field as a senior, member of the Class of 1970.
But when you entered Northwestern, in the fall of 1966, if someone had tried to tell you that you'd see activism and protest and dissent come alive at Northwestern before you graduated, you would have laughed.
That sort of thing happened at schools like Berkeley and Michigan, not at Northwestern, the "Country Club of the North Shore." Not at Northwestern, where the wealthiest families in the Midwest sent their daughters and sons. Not at Northwestern, where the sophomore class the year you entered school included just five black students. Not at Northwestern, where half of men were in fraternities and two-thirds of women were in sororities, most of which included no blacks or Jews.
You were entering a school where women would be turned away from the dining halls unless they were wearing a skirt or dress; where women who stayed out past their 10 p.m. curfew could be denied the privilege of going out on weekend evenings or could even be suspended from classes; where it was against the rules for men and women to enter each others' dorm rooms.
Yet things were changing, even during your first year. The admissions department had expanded financial aid and begun aggressively recruiting lower and middle class students and blacks, starting with you, the Class of 1970, and every year the campus would get a little more diverse. Students for a Democratic Society, a small and relatively quiet student group which had drawn little attention from the student body since its founding in 1965, began to grow in size and become more active, and by late spring of 1967, drew 2,000 to their anti-war teach-in, although the event was strongly criticized for being "one-sided." That same spring, a student named Ellis Pines emerged as a candidate for president of the Student Senate on the platform of "Student Power"; a week later, he had defeated the "serious candidates" and won the election. He drew hundreds to his rallies, which he called "bitch-ins," in which he collected student grievances and led marches to the administration buildings. But when at one Student Power rally an American flag was displayed upside-down, the backlash against Pines and his movement was furious, and within a month of its creation, Student Power was disbanded.
When you came back to Evanston in fall 1967 as a sophomore, you learned that University President J. Roscoe Miller had declared the past spring's trial of parietal hours (in which a few hours a week were opened up to allow men and women to spend time together in their dorm rooms) a failure — parents and alumni had complained, and so they were once again forbidden. Students were outraged; several dorms declared themselves "autonomous living units," and the Student Senate issued an ultimatum to Miller, to which he acquiesced in less than a month. By your senior year, nearly all of these restrictive in loco parentis rules would be gone.
Most students were focused on these sorts of issues, but Students for a Democratic Society and other groups continued to grow and to keep issues like civil rights and the Vietnam War in the student body's attention. In February 1968, SDS organized a protest of Dow Chemical, producer of napalm, recruiting on Northwestern's campus. The demonstration drew 500 students, who gathered at the recuitment site and then made an unscheduled detour to the administration buildings.
As the Daily Northwestern reported the next day, "The message, as the leaders of the demonstration put it, was 'We have to look at our own lives and see how we contribute to this system. Then we must organize and redirect the uses of this university.'" Yet after the high-visibility protest was over, most of the students returned to their daily lives, and SDS returned to a largely quiet state.
In the face of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, riots across the country, and increasing black student activism, black students at Northwestern seized the moment in spring 1968, issuing demands and then beginning a sit-in at the bursar's office on May 3.
110 of the 120 black students on campus were involved in the sit-in and won many of their demands, including a University commitment to admit black students in proportion to their percentage of the population (including an emphasis on recruiting poor blacks), the creation of an African American studies program, and the creation of the Black House. It was during this time that an Ohio State student wrote to her friend at Northwestern: "It has completely surprised everyone down here to learn that the most apathetic school in the Big Ten is finally doing something."
But the administration's decision to negotiate with the black students received scathing criticism from alumni, trustees, and the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, and it became clear that it was extremely unlikely that the administration would be so "soft" on protests again.
The summer of 1968 saw Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy's death, violent clashes between demonstrators and police at the Democrats' presidential convention in Chicago, and the Democrats' nomination of sitting Vice-President Hubert Humphrey over anti-war candidates including Eugene McCarthy. That fall, when you returned to campus for your junior year, SDS was drawing more interest than ever — over 100 people showed up at the first meeting of the year — but they did little to capitalize on this committment, at least in terms of reaching out to the larger community. They began to make statements to the Daily Northwestern about their belief that "the system" uses demonstrations as a catharsis and that "probably the days of peaceful demonstrations on college campuses are nearly over." As the elections neared and anti-war protesters met Humphrey at nearly every campaign stop, Northwestern's SDS ran a "Don't Vote" drive, and in November, Richard Nixon was elected President with a slim lead in the popular vote but a more decisive electoral win.
The following spring, when black students entered the Triangle fraternity house in response to a brother's treatment of a black woman, they caused significant property damage. The discipline process for these students became a cause of great concern on campus, culminating in a long hunger strike of black students and white sympathizers. The hunger strikers were barely acknowledged, let alone taken seriously, by the administration.
Soon after, a small-scale non-violent SDS demonstration during ROTC drills on Deering resulted in a harsh disciplinary crackdown which ignored abundant eyewitness testimony and resulted in the suspension of one student from Northwestern for a full year, a punishment that left him vulnerable to the draft and infuriated students. The next week, 600 students were involved in disrupting ROTC classes. Yet finals were beginning and the end of the school year was near, and interest in the issue dissipated over the summer.
The following school year saw burgeoning student interest in a wide variety of issues, from women's liberation, to student and faculty representation on the Board of Trustees, to activism around pollution and the environment (including calls for University divestment from companies for environmental reasons), to a movement to abolish grades at Northwestern — most of these largely separate from the efforts of radical students on campus. SDS, instead, was caught up in internal conflict and was becoming increasingly radical; that summer, the national group had splintered into a number of factions, including the Weather Underground. The main contributions of SDS at Northwestern were a series of ultimatums to the administration in December; these were not taken seriously by most other students, let alone administrators, and a January attack to damage the building where ROTC held classes.
And then, on April 30, President Nixon announced that the US had invaded Cambodia, and students at Northwestern and across the nation protested. And after four students were killed at Kent State Universitiy on May 4, Northwestern — like hundreds of other colleges and universities across the country — shut down. Day after day, thousands of students poured into Deering Meadow to talk and listen and vote on proposals, and then flowed out into the streets of Evanston. 7,000 students trekked up to one rally at the football stadium that week. Formally dressed and genuinely bewildered Trustees sat in dorms and Greek houses to talk with students about their thoughts and feelings. The National Guard was called in by Evanston officials. Suddenly at Northwestern, anything seemed possible.
Yet as you return to the present, you might not want to forget that the stories of Northwestern 35 years ago bring not only hope, but warnings and wisdom. Because for all the sound and fury, for all of the suprising support for a radical restructuring of the university, the reality was that in 1970, not much changed. Much time and focus was channelled into planning a summer bus tour in which students would speak to people nationwide about the strike, which fell through for lack of funds; and a proposal for classes to be cancelled for the two weeks before the November elections each year, which was debated by faculty and administrators well into the summer and eventually rejected.
Sure, grades became optional for Spring Quarter 1970, but in the fall grading and classes had returned to the way they always were. Yes, trustees eventually made the university's stockholdings public, but the listings were simply passed along to the new student Stock Portfolio Advisory Commitee for study, and discussions of divestment faded away. The much heralded transformation of Northwestern into a New University was wished for by most students, but those students lacked the ideology, commitment, and understanding to carry those efforts forward.
And one group which had the potential to help transform that energy and enthusiasm into radical thought and proposals for concrete change, SDS, was largely disconnected from the strike. Their ever-growing radicalization over the past several years had created a gap between the activists and mainstream students. In fall 1969 in their short-lived publication Potempkin, they were writing things like: "Organizing on a college campus such as Northwestern where most of the students are part of the pig anyway doesn't make as much sense as getting things accomplished on that campus in solidarity with the oppressed masses of the world . . . The fear of alienating potential members no longer makes sense at NU where there are no new potential members," and "SDS must be ready for militant action . . . KICK THE ASS OF THE RULING CLASS; ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! POWER TO THE WORKER! OFF ROTC AT ALL COST!" Once the strike began, SDS seemed both unwilling and unable to attempt to breach the growing gap between them and mainstream students, instead choosing actions such as ransacking ROTC offices.
The May strike turned out to be, on the whole, a genuinely mainstream endeavor at Northwestern. It was a remarkable opening, in which the majority of students on campus began, practically overnight for most, to see themselves as part of "the movement." But no one seized the moment to suggest new and radical ways of thinking and acting to these thousands of energized students. Most students' feelings and thoughts were never pushed beyond the superficial, and the atmosphere dissipated more quickly than it had come, never again to be recaptured. Just a few months later, with the new school year, most students fell back into the old familiar patterns they were so accustomed to, and the crazy days and weeks of the previous spring felt like a dream. No one seemed to understand how it had ever happened at a place like Northwestern.
posted by The Protest at 11/26/2004
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home