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The time to write about lingering recollections of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement at Ohio State University in the late 1960's has finally arrived. As a former participant, in some ways those days seem like another life completely detached from the present but, in another sense, it's as though they happened just yesterday. No other set of past events stand out as clearly in my mind as those student anti-war experiences that occurred more than three decades ago. While concern over the Bush Administration's pre-emptive strike against Iraq rekindled these past memories, I wanted to write about this topic for many years.
During the turbulent decade of the 1960s, a rather affluent, socially conscious cohort of students entered colleges and universities. This generation, many of whom were influenced by political movements for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, became activated by the actions of university administrators who attempted to deny students their right to be advocates of political movements and to speak openly and freely in support of those causes (Heineman, 1993, p. 1).
Anti-Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s were present on most campuses; those institutions that had not experienced a certain amount of turmoil and disruption were the exception. On many university campuses, massive student demonstrations became a familiar occurrence. As the war intensified, there arose a decided increase in the tensions and scope of campus conflict, in terms of the tactics of both student resistance and the response of counter-resistance authorities (Scranton, 1970).
The range and scope of campus protests then make certain kinds of historical explanations entirely inadequate (Heineman, 2001). To explain away student protest during those years (as was often the view of critics then) as the activity of a small and unrepresentative minority of maladjusted students was inaccurate on two counts. First, as a national magazine survey suggested, roughly two-fifths of the then college student population expressed support for some activist values (Fortune Magazine, 1969, p. 68). Second, as the quote below suggests, fact-finding commissions from Berkeley to Columbia tended to present a rather favorable group portrait of student activists.
The present generation of young people in our universities is the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has...