Post on 09-May-2023
The Student Protest Movements of the Vietnam Era: AHistoriography
Laura Astorian, EDs
Kennesaw State University
The student protest movements during the late 1960s and
early 1970s were encouraged by the Free Speech Movement of
Berkley University and student discontent over the
escalation of the war in Vietnam. Growing out of the Free
Speech Movement were New Left groups such as the SDS, or
Students for a Democratic Society. The liberal shift in
discourse reached a peak in a riot at Columbia University in
1968 regarding university plans to build a segregated gym in
Harlem, as well as university participation with the
government in pro-Vietnam programs1. Later protests and
riots at universities across the country during the early
1970s built the anti-war movement into a national discussion
piece. It also created many questions as to how a group of
people previously seen as politically disinterested could
shift so drastically to being politically hyper-involved.
The idea that student protests consisted of “a good deal of
free time and access to mimeograph machines and the family
1 Richard Braungart and Margaret Braungart, “Protest Attitudes and Behavior Among College Youth: A U.S. Case Study,” Youth Society 6, no. 2 (1974): 219–48.
credit card2” is what is a simplistic concept that discounts
the lasting impact of these youth who contributed a lasting
change to the political process and involvement in the
national political discourse.
In the early 1970s, while the movement was still
current, the development of the New Left was a relevant
point of research. The underlying causes of the development
of the New Left may be assumed to be “Vietnam” and “student
rights,” but they were far more complicated. It was also
easy in the early 1970s to claim that the student movement
would “run its course” once the war in Vietnam had ended as
many sociologists and historians had yet to examine the
movement in a deeper way3. Analysis of the issue by James
O’Brien in 1971 stated that the beginning of the modern
student protest movement was 1960 and its sit-in movements.
The sit-ins were effective protest movements used by African
Americans and sympathetic northern students to protest civil2 Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds, Vietnam--America in the War Years, v. 1 (Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 2002).3 J. P. O’Brien, “The Development of the New Left,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 395, no. 1 (January 1, 1971): 15–25, doi:10.1177/000271627139500103.
rights violations. O’Brien viewed these sit-ins as a sort of
protest icebreaker activity, or a beginner’s course to
successful social change. Today the sit-ins are viewed with
a more critical eye as being vital to raising awareness of a
national issue, rather than merely a way for young
idealistic white college students to try their hand at
having a social voice4. The evolution of the movement began
with civil rights based issues and questions about nuclear
testing; this is evidence, according to O’Brien, that the
movement began with being concerned about off-campus
issues5. The idea of civil disobedience against the
universities was still a few years away. The university at
this time was viewed as a place where critical thought and
intellectualism could have safe harbor, and this theme is
repeated multiple times during O’Brien’s work:
“As an Oberlin student put it, the student
‘can and must be the one to criticize, to
examine. He is the only one who, because of4 Theodore Carter Delaney, “The Sit-In Demonstrations in Historic Perspective,” North Carolina Historical Review 87, no. 4 (October 2010): 431–38.5 O’Brien, “The Development of the New Left.”
his inherent status, is in the logical
position to do these things, so essential
to a progressive and democratic society.6”
Analysis of what makes the student the “the one to
criticize” injustice on and off campus is lacking in
O’Brien’s analysis of the progression of the student protest
movement. The movement was still current as of the writing
of his article on the development of the New Left; perhaps
the “why” was not as important to the author as the “how.”
Student groups such as the Student Peace Union and the
Trotskyist Young Socialist Alliance are mentioned, but the
motivation and presumably “free thought” that could be
included in a story about their foundings are left out. This
is disappointing, as room for a parallel comparison between
the early student groups and the groups founded in the late
1960s and early 1970s is ample. What better way to begin
that comparison than by an analysis of the motivations for
joining that group instead of a cursory admission that some
motivation existed only due to students’ “inherent status?”
6 Ibid.
The Free Speech Movement is given deeper analysis, as
it focused student unrest on campus issues in association
with national issues, which is a reoccurring theme of the
student protest movement. Berkley University banned
solicitation for off-campus political actions, such as sit-
ins and other protests. This caused the students to
“revolt,” according to O’Brien, though the actions taken by
the students are ignored, though a passing mention of the
sit-ins at the University of Wisconsin in protest to
involvement with the Dow Chemical Company’s production of
napalm is given7. Again, the reasoning behind the protests
are omitted nearly entirely, which weakens O’Brien’s
argument that the “movement has brought a weakening of the
cohesive forces of a present-day capitalist society” that
“could lead only to social dissolution, open militarization,
or both”. These words are colored by the emotion of having
been written during the midst of the student rights
pinnacle; O’Brien’s assentation that the movement has “led
to tentative insights about the type of society that ought
7 Ibid.
to be possible in the United states” and that the movement
could lead to a Socialist revolution rings hollow with the
lack of analysis present in his work.
By 1974 the student protest movement had started to
wane due to decreasing US military involvement in Vietnam,
and the emphasis shifted from O’Brien’s analysis of the
impact on the future through organizations of the past and
to an in-depth investigation of who made up the social
movements. How did these students become involved in radical
student groups to begin with – what was there about the
sociological make-up of the student groups that contributed
to their interest in joining? Braungart and Braungart assert
that students were drawn to more radical student
organizations as a result of on-campus violent incidents
that were viewed to have happened in response to student
protests8. After seeing the outcome of a large social
movement, it is understandable to want to investigate the
movement at the level of the individual participant for a
8 Braungart and Braungart, “Protest Attitudes and Behavior Among College Youth: A U.S. Case Study.”
better understanding of the motivations of the movement at
large.
The participants in Braungart and Braungart’s study are
radical youth engaged in confrontation politics, who were
“drawn into campus movements as a reaction to violence9.”
These were radical youth on both sides of the political
spectrum, whose political attitudes were in line with their
parents’, but who were also radicalized by the college
experience and participation in protests. Peer influence
during the college experience became important in the
radicalization process; some students changed political
orientations entirely by virtue of being in a politically
active environment10. Political activity came directly from
the college environment, not from the home. Therefore,
according to Braungart and Braungart, the environment was
key, which refutes earlier studies from the late 1960s by
Clarke and Eagan and Geller and Howard, who both state that
9 Ibid.10 Ibid.
the college environment have little impact on student
political attitudes11.
In contrast to the authors’ assertions that the
environment would create an urge to protest, 59% of the
respondents in their study felt no need at all, while 22%
had the urge but did not. Nineteen percent of the 800-
person sample had demonstrated12. However, liberal arts
majors were more likely to participate in demonstrating than
non-liberal arts majors (31% to 19%), perhaps lending
validation to the argument. Students with higher GPAs who
may be assumed to be more involved in school had the highest
rate of participation or desire to demonstrate13. However,
this urge to demonstrate was not tied to political party;
nearly 50% of the independent students without party
affiliation either wanted to protest but did not, or did in
fact protest. The authors suggest that this lack of party 11 James W. Clarke and Joseph Egan, “Social and Political Dimensions of Campus Protest Activity,” The Journal of Politics 34,no. 02 (May 1972): 500–523, doi:10.2307/2129365; Jesse D. Geller and Gary Howard, “Student Activism and the War in Vietnam.,” August 1969, http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED033427.12 Braungart and Braungart, “Protest Attitudes and Behavior Among College Youth: A U.S. Case Study.”13 Ibid.
affiliation as well as desire to protest arises from
exposure to a politically charged academic environment.
Discussion of politics in this environment lead to a cycle
of reciprocal determinism that encouraged student protest as
well.
Missing in this analysis, however, are the voices of
the students who may have been radicalized by a politically
active university environment. Why was this study conducted
via questionnaire using a quantitative method? Why did the
authors not want to include a qualitative element that may
better explain the decisions for student involvement in
protest movements? It is an oversight to not include this.
Would including interview responses remove any distance
between the movement and these researchers? Possibly. Is
there a reason for the distance between the topic and the
authors? The movement, while waning at the time, was still
fresh on the minds of universities and the public. What
would adding the voices of do to the acceptability of this
study as part of this environment?
The same method of analysis, which is lacking in
personal reflection or interviews is applied in Levine and
Wilson’s 1979 study regarding the decline and transformation
of the protest movement14. By the late 1970s, the vibrant
protest movement that caused the nation to take notice had
dwindled to practically nothing; “the aura of student
revolution no longer exists.15” The authors suggest that
previous student activist movements prior to World War I,
the Great Depression, and the 1960s all ended abruptly. The
protest movement of the late 1960s that carried over into
the 1970s, however, appeared to disappear but instead
shifted form from student revolution as a whole to an
approach centered in “me-ism,” a popular complaint about the
young generation during the late 1970s16. By the end of the
decade, membership in radical student groups such as the SDS
had dwindled to nearly nothing, while active participation 14 Arthur Levine and Keith R. Wilson, “Student Activism in the 1970s: Transformation Not Decline,” Higher Education 8, no.6 (November 1, 1979): 627–40.15 Ibid.16 Robert C. Sickels, “1970s Disco Daze: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and the Last Golden Age of Irresponsibility,” Journal of Popular Culture 35, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 49.
in the Young Democrats and Young Republicans dropped
significantly. Nationally, little attention was paid in the
press to localized student protests signifying something
between distain and burnout with the movement.
The authors believe that this is a symptom of a shift
in national attitude away from participation in movements to
interest in the individual; it was “a basic change in our
conception of the American community and our place in it17.”
Society moved away from community focus, therefore
community-focused protest had become a thing of the past.
During the late 1970s, there was a “four-fold increase in
the proportion of people who feel left out of the things
around them18.” This does not herald a time where community
activism would see success. Feeling left out of society was
the end of “us.” Protest shifted to an individual dominated
focus, namely lawsuits against universities and student-
interest affinity groups that were focused on improving
living for one particular group, such as Latino Americans,
African Americans, and women. Instead of a general 17 Levine and Wilson, “Student Activism in the 1970s.”18 Ibid.
betterment of society, there was betterment of a
constituency. The movement of the New Left was dead, the
postmortem had been conducted; now there was nothing left to
do but reflect on its impact.
Dismissiveness of the student movement and students in
general as “petit-bourgeois19” was common in the 1980s, as
social change from the student movements of the 1970s did
not materialize in a perceivably lasting manner. The
concepts of “students as standard-bearers of opposition to
the regime” and “the privileged status of an intelligentsia”
have been replaced by no special political status
whatsoever20. This would have been understandably
frustrating for participants in movements that sparked
national conversation and a shift in national attitudes, as
the student protest movement against the Vietnam War did.
The movements that students participated in did not have
much staying power; for example, once Vietnam was done, it
was done.
19 Chris Rootes, “Students as Agents of Radical Social Change,” Social Alternatives 2, no. 1 (March 1981): 51–55.20 Ibid.
The long-term effects of student protest may be less
noticeable, which leads to the assumption of failure. It
could be argued, as Rootes does, that the protests of the
late 1960s and early 1970s created a “politically distinct
generation.” By emphasizing the concept of a “Silent
Majority,” President Nixon laid out the expectation of a
“vocal minority21,” though that vocal minority became
quieter as time passed. In a distinctly early-1980s nod to
economic problems, Rootes points out that this politics may
take the form of a desire to be active in a political
consciousness rather than actual protest itself. “Thus in
times of rising unemployment and increasing economic
insecurity, collective political action … is something of a
luxury22…”
The politicization of a generation of college students
seemed to Richard Nixon as “proof of the loss of reason23,”
so much so that Vice President Spiro Agnew tried to
21 Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed like Nothing Happened: America in the 1970s (New Brunswick [N.J.]: Rutgers University Press, 1982).22 Rootes, “Students as Agents of Radical Social Change.”23 Carroll, It Seemed like Nothing Happened.
characterize students as a small group with privilege
despite the fact their methods of demonstration (sit-ins,
marches, and building occupations) are indicative of a group
with minimal resources24. The juxtaposition of these two
perspectives of students is interesting; as the clout of the
movement diminished and faded into the past, it was
recognized for what it was: concerned citizens doing what
they can with what they had. The hyperbole of Agnew
comparing them to Adolf Hitler’s SA or the Klu Klux Klan25
is more absurd when viewed against the economic backdrop of
traditional college students.
Perhaps in a sign of the acceptance of “me-ism,”
student protest became noted as being selfless moral protest
again rather than the protest of the individual that Levine
and Wilson concluded that it had become. In fact, protest
was now seen as a stop on Kohlberg’s moral reasoning
development path that were spurred forward by an improving
economic climate during the early and mid-1970s26. The
24 Rootes, “Students as Agents of Radical Social Change.”25 Carroll, It Seemed like Nothing Happened.26 Rootes, “Students as Agents of Radical Social Change.”
epoch of the “student as moral figures” concept may be seen
as the Kent State shootings, which pitted students against
armed National Guardsmen with live ammunition. The deaths of
four students “brought the war back home27” and gave the
student protest movement momentum and urgency. This urgency
and belief that change could be accomplished was short
lived. The movement’s optimism which built in the years
after Kent State28 dropped as the economy did. Also
detrimental to the movement’s urgency, “[t]he terrifying
issue of violent death, nestled deep in the national psyche,
receded from public discourse.” This forgetting was
encouraged by the end of the Vietnam War as well. Despite
the shift in the attitudes of the country and the movement,
Rootes concludes that it would be foolish to consider the
movement a failure due to long-lasting political
involvement, coupled with the specter of an improving
27 Carroll, It Seemed like Nothing Happened.28 James D. Orcutt and James M. Fendrich, “Students’ Perceptions of the Decline of Protest: Evidence from the Early Seventies,” Sociological Focus 13, no. 3 (August 1980): 203–13.
economy that may encourage an entirely new generation of
involved student activists.
Analysis of the fading of the student protest movement
was a focal point of studies completed during the 1980s as
well. The time for the “who” and “how” of the movement
itself had passed; instead, the why of perceived failure was
the question du jour. In Orcutt and Fendrich’s 1980 study,
little attention was paid to larger economic issues or
changing national climates. The focus was on the individual
level; the researchers questioned subjects regarding the
perceived risk of personal sanction, internal weaknesses in
the movement, and changes in student values. This is, again,
reminiscent of Levine and Wilson’s idea of “me-ism:” the
movement is no bigger than the individual parts. This is
given credence by the fact that nearly half of the survey
respondents selected “more emphasis now on changing self
than society” as their most important reason as to why the
protest movement faded. This was a “shift in values that was
widely seen as responsible for growing pursuit of personal
change at the expense of social activism during the early
1970s.29” Those students who were deeply involved in the
movement shifted their focus to personal repercussions such
as suspensions and expulsion from university as the movement
waned. Orcutt and Fendrich concluded that the change in
subjective interests of politically active movements during
the early 1970s contributed to the decline of not just the
activist movement, but for the prospect of further
activism30. This is in contrast to Rootes’ cautiously
optimistic theory that former student activists had evolved
into more socially responsible adults still prone to the
desire for activism.
As the passage of time distanced student protest from
public consciousness, the movement dwindled in relevance.
During the 1990s, student protest movements were vibrant
overseas, such as the Wild Lily movement in China. In the
United States, however, students did not find much
nationally to protest. They did protest the Gulf War, but
this was not a united front, as students who were against
29 Ibid.30 Orcutt and Fendrich, “Students’ Perceptions of the Decline of Protest.”
the war were countered by a group named Students Mobilized
Against Saddam Hussein, or SMASH. Aside from the dis-unified
occasional protest against the first Gulf War, students
typically focused on issues pertinent to their universities
or local areas, which did not garner much national interest
or sympathy31.
The image of students protesting university alcohol
policies may have lead to a dismissive attitude regarding
the effectiveness of earlier protests, leading authors such
as Philip Altbach to assert that student protest movements
in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a “minimal impact on
either society or the university32.” In fact, he goes as far
as to dismiss the protest movement as being completely
unsuccessful, despite later stating that student protest
helped create anti-Vietnam attitudes during the early 1970s.
Altbach believes that protest movements did have minor
successes, but since the protests did not lead to a
31 Mark Edelman Boren, Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject(Routledge, 2013).32 Philip G. Altbach, Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis, Foundations of Higher Education (New Brunswick, NJ, USA: Transaction Publishers, 1997).
permanent revolutionary ideal, that they were notable for
nothing more than being a “seedbed of … cultural
movements33.” To Altbach, despite devoting an entire book to
student protest movements and politics in America,
collegiate protest movements are not indicative of a
“tradition of student activism,” and that activism is “not
considered a legitimate part of the student culture34,”
possibly because of the minimal number of students who
actively protested. Altbach attributes visibility of the
protest movement to mass media, not to membership. The media
seized on student protests on a national level because of
the emphasis on foreign affairs as opposed to local, and the
student protest movement failed because of the temporary
nature of those foreign affair issues35.
Countering this perspective is Nella van Dyke’s 1998
study tracing the origins of student protest movements and
their tendency to appear repeatedly on certain college
campuses. Piggybacking off of studies conducted during the
33 Ibid.34 Ibid.35 Ibid.
1970s that noted continuing activism at elite schools, van
Dyke uses quantitative methods to bolster a social movement
theory perspective. Her hypothesis, that student protest
movements tend to occur at schools with a tradition of
social protest is proven36, refutes Altbach’s assertions
that student movements are a symptom of just one time during
American history. Individual student predispositions may
couple with student upbringing to lead to high feelings of
self-efficacy, but the foundation of that self-efficacy may
be moot without a university history of a protest community.
Schools with an active protest community history also have
involvement in activism that covers more than just one
social issue. Activists at the time viewed themselves
working toward broader social change, not just being focused
on one social issue37.
Schools with a history of activism were four times more
likely to have had active protest movements during the late
1960s and early 1970s than schools that did not38. These 36 Nella Van Dyke, “Hotbeds of Activism: Locations of Student Protest,” Social Problems 45, no. 2 (May 1998): 205–20.37 Ibid.38 Ibid.
schools had multi-movement protest cultures comprised of
many students with high levels of self-efficacy. It is not
difficult to make the connection between van Dyke’s complex
and active historical communities and Roote’s cautiously
optimistic protest generation, who have adapted and changed
with the times. The presence of historical protest movements
at schools that may have been less active during some eras
than they were in others shows that the concept of protest
survives even when the movements may not be necessary or
relevant a given time. “The influence of history occurs due
to the persistence of activist subcultures that may
influence the reemergence of activism in the same
location39.” Applying that to a national level, when the
student members of protest movements spread throughout
society, the historical tradition that they represent is
still present. It may just be temporarily dormant, needing a
culturally important issue to reinvigorate the drive to
protest.
39 Ibid.
A culturally relevant issue encouraging the
revitalization of that drive is the approach of an
anniversary of a seminal event. 1995 marked the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the shootings of four unarmed students at
Kent State University in Ohio. These shootings, carried out
by the National Guard, were done in response to days worth
of protest by students of Richard Nixon’s beginning of
bombing campaigns in Cambodia. The student protests, while
not necessarily violent, were also not peaceful, and members
of the National Guard fired on protestors in response to a
perceived threat or possibly an imagined order. This would
not be the only shooting death of students. In 1968, three
South Carolina State College students returning from an
integration protest were killed by state patrolmen, and ten
days after Kent State, two students were shot and killed in
integration related protests at Jackson State College in
Mississippi.
The indignation felt by many who were current students
at that time spurred movements to change the university
system, and not necessarily at white, elite universities.
When classes resumed at schools in the fall of 1970,
“students, faculty, and administrators entered a decade-
negotiation over structures, nature, and content of the
curriculum40.” Modern culture wars, both academic and
cultural, arose from the debate regarding curriculum on
campus after the spring semester of 1970. While budgetary
concerns created cutbacks during the 1980s, students and
faculty pushed for a renewal of investment during those
programs in the 1990s. The activism that was present in the
1970s lead to academic change on campus as well as a renewal
of interest in these new academic areas. “Implicit in the
demands of these marginalized and excluded groups was a
fundamental critique of the underlying assumptions… of
American education41.” The ideals of the late 1960s and
1970s, organized by the spirit of the protest movements of
previous decades, continued to flourish through the 1990s.
As anniversaries of protests approached, research began
with renewed interest in first-person accounts of the
40 Darlene Clark Hine, “The Greater Kent State Era, 1968-1970,” Peace & Change 21, no. 2 (April 1996): 157.41 Ibid.
movements. The thirtieth and fortieth anniversaries of Kent
State and the surrounding student protests encouraged
research that was not focused on the analysis of who made up
the movement, or why some schools were more prone to have
student protest communities than other schools. The Kent
State protests in 1970s were a catalyst to a national
student strike movement that participants believed
contributed to a growth in social consciousness.
The beginnings of the movement and the student protests
at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale were framed as
a way of honoring the dead at Kent State by continuing the
anti-Vietnam War movement. Instead of a student memorial
service, it was encouraged for students to “have a struggle
service42.” This “struggle service” also incorporated local
movements and local campus issues to which Orcutt and
Fendrich attributed the decline of the movement. Many
schools’ protest movements centered around in loco parentis
policies, which gave universities the right to dictate when 42 Robbie Lieberman and David Cochran, “We Closed Down the Damn School: The Party Culture and Student Protest at Southern Illinois University During the Vietnam War Era,” Peace & Change 26, no. 3 (July 2001): 316.
men and women could study together in dorms43. Some schools,
such as SIUC, had a party culture that may have contributed
to violent outbreaks of bomb threats, burning down the Old
Main Building, and off-campus riots. SIUC student body
president Dwight Campbell said: “There is a crisis on this
campus and this is just the beginning. Going up against a
club with a flower will never work44.” This combination of
party school tendencies, New Left organizations, and student
rights advocates closed down schools and encouraged new
protest movements on a wider range. Instead of “me-ism”
being a negative, these protest movements coupled with this
me-ism was parlayed into wider, effective movements whose
specificity were as effective, if not more so, than the
protest movements of the Vietnam era. These movements gained
media attention, both good and bad, that contributed to
national discussion on issues such as gay rights and
feminism45.43 Ibid.; Huff, Christopher A., “Radicals Between the Hedges: The Origins of the New Left at the University of Georgia and the 1968 Sit-In,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 94, no. 2 (June 2010): 179.44 Lieberman and Cochran, “We Closed down the Damn School.”45 Small, Antiwarriors.
While SIUC’s movement had violent tendencies that
enjoyed engaging local police in the name of “student
power46” and necessitated 1,200 National Guard soldiers to
respond to a Vietnam War protest, not every student protest
closed campuses. The “indignation or rage” that
“characterize[ed] those of the new moral experience” was
instrumental in bringing the movement to the national
light47, but it existed alongside protests that were not
angry. Southern campus radicals had to walk a fine line
between addressing social issues and not angering a southern
society that were not receptive the to movement’s message.
The University of Georgia’s New Left community staged sit-
ins in 1968. While this was not a huge moment in the overall
New Left activist community, when one considers the backlash
to university integration that included rioting, holding a
progressive student sit-in was a drastic moment of
resistance to a predominantly conservative student and
administrative environment.46 Lieberman and Cochran, “We Closed down the Damn School.”47 John Hundscheid, “Raising Cain: The University Student and the Politics of Protest,” Academic Questions 23, no. 2 (June 2010): 225–34.
Much like the concerns of the students at SIUC, the UGA
students were upset regarding the administration’s in loco
parentis policies. These were coupled with civil rights
concerns more so than the Vietnam War protesting.
Specifically, students were concerned about the disparities
between rules for men and women48. The reaction of the
majority of conservative UGA students was expected. Red and
Black columnist W. Grant Weyman called members of the SDS and
other New Left groups “sign carrying kids making asses out
of themselves.49” Board of Regents member Roy V. Harris
called the protesters Communists for their local activities
against segregation. Despite the negative backlash of the
time, the student protest movement at UGA is outlined here
in Huff’s analysis as being effective in furthering dialogue
on segregationist policies, students’ rights, and women’s
rights. Little analysis is given to who made up the movement
or why they did so on an individual basis; instead, the
lasting impact of the movement is the focal point. 48 Huff, Christopher A., “Radicals Between the Hedges: The Origins of the New Left at the University of Georgia and the1968 Sit-In.”49 Ibid.
Student protest movements at North Carolina State
University had to walk the same line as the protest
movements at UGA. Instead of the protests in Athens, which
were focused on women’s rights and integration, student
protests at NC State were a response to the Kent State
shootings. Instead of violent practices, the “infrequent
protests at North Carolina State were non-violent and often
connected to activities designed to educate students about
the war50.” These educational movements were again coupled
with concerns about in loco parentis policies, but they were
surprisingly tolerated at NC State.
University Chancellor John Caldwell was against the
Vietnam War himself and advocated for more lenient policies
on campus for the students. The account of Caldwell is
jarring to the traditional narrative of the protest movement
as student-centered entirely. Instead of shutting down the
university or having to call in the National Guard, the
university had student discussion workshops. When student 50 Christopher C. Broadhurst, “‘We Didn’t Fire a Shot, We Didn’t Burn a Building’: The Student Reaction at North Carolina State University to the Kent State Shootings, May 1970,” North Carolina Historical Review 87, no. 3 (July 2010): 283.
protests did commence, protest leaders such as student body
president Cathy Sterling advocated “that all students seek
with all haste and strength the positive, constructive
alternatives to violence so that this nation will not be
torn apart…51” As a glaring contrast to many other protest
movements, the movement at NC State was organized, orderly,
and respectful. Accounts of NC State’s response to Kent
State and the Vietnam War serve as an important focal point
of the study of the protest movement. The movements in the
South are not only a contrast to other movements, but are
also a topic of future investigation and research regarding
the desire for activism that remained strong in other
students after the movement ended. Was that desire still
strong in participants in Southern protest movements such as
NC State’s?
The tactics of the Southern protest movements, which
involved marches and student building take-overs, were not
supported at the time by student bodies as a whole, but it
built a foundation for Southern student activism. Its use of
51 Ibid.
non-violent strategies “based on a local political and
social environment52” included a forgotten region of student
protest in the national discussion. Huff’s analysis of the
movement at the University of Georgia re-introduces the
South into the discussion of the student activist movement.
Recent analysis furthers the perspective of student
protest as an effective movement that changed the national
political discussion in the early 1970s. Students today may
feel empowered to contribute to and influence the political
process due to the continuation of communities of political
dissent and discussion. Members of the generation who
protested the Vietnam War, in loco parentis rules, and
repressive laws against minorities have passed strong
feelings of the necessity of being involved in the political
process to their children. Students attending universities
such as Berkley, which has a strong tradition of student
activism, are exercising their newly developed abilities in
Kohlberg’s post-conventional morality stage. Whether this
52 Huff, Christopher A., “Radicals Between the Hedges: The Origins of the New Left at the University of Georgia and the1968 Sit-In.”