Protests leave lasting change in relationship between SU, students
http://www.dailyorange.com/permanent-record-protests-leave-lasting-change-in-relationship-between-su-students-1.1471934
By Erinn Connor
May 4, 2010
Vietnam War Protests: 40 years later, part 3 of 3
In the bottom left drawer of Ralph Ketcham's desk is his stack of
grade books from his years as a history professor.
They're old and worn; they were carried everywhere, opened and
flipped through often, full of pen marks and red pencil.
One book amid the pile holds the names of students from Ketcham's two
classes from the spring semester of 1970. He had an undergraduate
class of about 20 students and a graduate class with roughly a dozen
students, both relatively small.
Scanning down the list of names, Ketcham knows what a lot of his
students went on to accomplish in their lives:
"Director of development at Columbia University Medical Center. He
was a preacher. Teaches college in California. He worked in the State
Department for a long time. She was a journalist in South Carolina. A
distinguished law professor," said Ketcham, rattling off the
occupations in succession.
But really, any college class, before and after the spring of 1970,
can produce students who will go on to hold notable professions and
be successful. But these students attended Syracuse University during
arguably the most volatile time in the school's modern history.
That May saw a five-day protest of the Vietnam War on campus, causing
canceled classes and takeovers of student buildings. Many of
Ketcham's former students organized and staged these anti-war movements.
Though the Vietnam protests at Syracuse were commended for peaceful
demeanor unlike many student protests at colleges across the country,
they can also be seen as a death knell of a conservative social
atmosphere at Syracuse University. The institution that once
essentially acted as students' parents let its students voice their
anti-war sentiments, and it sometimes listened.
When Paul Finkelman arrived on campus as a freshman in the fall of
1967, he did not get the same rush of independence that most college
freshmen get today. While technically students had moved out of their
parents' homes, they'd essentially just gained another set of parents.
Leading up into the late 1960s, universities across the country
operated under the philosophy "in loco parentis." This allows the
university to act in place of a parent, so it can institute policies
and rules it deems to be in the best interest of students.
"When I arrived, woman students had hours they had to be in dorms,"
said Finkelman, now a law professor at Albany Law School. "In order
to have a woman on a men's floor or vice versa, you had to go to the
dean of women and get permission."
The conservative atmosphere of the Syracuse campus did not match that
of other university cultural revolutions across the country. There
was the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at
Berkeley and protests at Southern Illinois University, among others,
which sought to stop the control the university had over students.
The legal drinking age at that time was 18, and it seemed absurd that
a college junior wasn't allowed to have a beer in his room. If a
woman had a man in her room, the door had to be halfway open.
"Students didn't want to be treated as children and have the
university as their parent," said David Bennett, a history professor
who taught on campus during the protests. "There was upheaval in a
lot of different ways."
So the students rebelled against their institutional parents and
demanded independence. Though Finkelman would later become a
figurehead for the war protests, his first involvement in student
activism during his freshman and sophomore years was about the
culture of Syracuse University.
Students held protests and went on strike for dorm autonomy or the
right for people to live how they wanted and be able to choose for
themselves what their social atmosphere would be like. And the
university relinquished its parental rights.
"The year before I came to SU, the president of student government
was suspended for drinking a beer in one of the dormitories,"
Finkelman said. "When I left, men and women were taking showers
together in dormitories, so there was a dramatic change of social
culture of the campus."
In 1968, drinking was permitted at certain social functions. Later
that year, SU announced plans to build a coed dormitory.
"That was the first sort of revolution that took place on campus,"
Finkelman said.
After students gained more control of their collegiate lives, the
fuse of change that had been lit started to burn toward another
potential tinderbox: the Vietnam War.
The draft sparked a majority of the student anti-war movements across
the country. It was again that lack of control, that lack of choice
that angered students. They thought, 'Why should we be forced to
fight in a war that we don't believe is justified?'
Bob Tembeckjian was a spokesman for the Student Strike Committee
during the spring of 1970. The spark that ignited the strike was
President Richard Nixon's announcement that the United States invaded
Cambodia and seemingly expanded the war.
"We wanted to stop business as usual while the country was engaged in
a war that seemed to not only be unending but also being expanded,"
said Tembeckjian, who was a sophomore that spring. "The institutions
we were closest to were the universities we were attending, so it was
a natural subject of our activity."
The school was closed for five days. The students occupied Hendricks
Chapel. Barricades were erected to block faculty and administration
from driving into the university.
Roger Sharp's office window in Maxwell looks out at the drive that
was blocked 40 years ago. He observed the student movements at
Berkeley, where he was a teaching assistant, and later when he became
a professor at SU.
After the students went on strike and stopped going to class, the
administration began to consider whether or not to cancel classes
altogether. This decision caused a rift in the faculty, particularly
in the history department, over whether or not to concede that
students had gotten control of their academic experience.
Some members were against closing the school and thought that
academics should not be interrupted. Others supported the students
and organized teach-ins and other seminars during the strike.
"It was a controversial question among the faculty," Sharp said.
"There were some colleagues who said to students, 'If I were you, I
would resist the draft.' I don't know how forward they were about
saying it, but I felt uncomfortable because if you're not of draft
age or eligible, then you can't say that to someone."
Bennett, who was an anti-war figure himself, supported the students
while also simultaneously being against shutting down the university.
He organized the first "teach-in" at SU back in 1965 in Gifford Auditorium.
"I thought the university shouldn't close in service of the strike,"
Bennett said. "I thought it should be a place where people could
organize either for or against the war."
Bennett organized a faculty committee to keep the university open,
yet he remained close with his students such as Tembeckjian and
Finkelman, who were leaders of strike. Sharp alienated a few of his
colleagues with his support for the students, some of whom didn't
speak to him for a long time after the spring of 1970. Ketcham
supported the students from afar and continued to hold classes at his home.
Despite the controversy among faculty, students like Tembeckjian and
Finkelman were still interested in receiving an education despite the
strike. The university gave students the option of finishing classes
normally, taking an incomplete or taking the grade they earned up to
that point.
"It wasn't anti-intellectual," Finkelman said. "I was paying a lot of
money to be there and I wanted to get a decent education. The notion
was that you were striking to be doing something other than going to
class because anti-war activity was more important."
Graduation was a peaceful affair, and Tembeckjian was allowed to give
a speech on behalf of the strike committee to explain why the
students shut down the campus. But anxiety still grew among
graduating men since they could end up being drafted.
"It didn't matter if you had a good job or were going to graduate
school," said Tembeckjian. "There was a likelihood that you were
going to end up fighting or somehow participating in the war."
But shortly after graduation, the draft ended and a volunteer army
was instated. This defused most, if not all, of the student anger
toward the war. They could now control their participation in the
war. They had their choice back.
The following spring, Ketcham oversaw a class called "The Good
University," created by Finkelman and a graduate student. It revolved
around the history of higher education and different theories about
what the university ought to be like, involving things that had just
been called into question by student bodies across the country.
Even so, the memory of the strike dissipated quickly after that
spring. The following year, freshmen in Bennett's Modern American
History class couldn't believe something like a schoolwide strike
could happen at SU. Student activism since 1970 has, for the most
part, been dormant.
"In the 1970s students believed they could get power away from these
people who they disagreed with," Bennett said. "But within a few
years that was not the case."
But the legacy of the movement lives on, in big and small ways.
Students have more social freedom than ever on campus, compared with
the conservative 1960s. Finkelman said he still gets calls about the
protests from students and journalists a couple times a year. It's
seen in the red-penciled "incompletes" and "class standing" next to
spring 1970 classes in Ketcham's grade book. It's in the lasting
friendships that Bennett has with his students from that time.
"It was a very extraordinary moment in institutional history,"
Bennett said. "It was probably one of the most dramatic moments in
the modern history of this university."
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