Welcome to “The Campuses are Gonna Blow”: Anti-War Protest at American Colleges and Universities during the Vietnam War. This project blends historiography, a traditional historic approach, with a modern, digital format in an effort to better understand the anti-Vietnam protests on college campuses. It endeavors to offer a broad scope for understanding student protests against the war on a national level, while simultaneously exploring how national and local responses to the war during the 1960s-1970s impacted a specific campus: the University of Rhode Island.
The historiography for this project is broken into four primary arguments and focal points that has been represented in both scholarly and popular literature and other sources. These can be explored under Perspectives. Primary sources from Distinctive Collections at the University of Rhode Island have been categorized into five separate collections: Miscellaneous Archives, Visual Media (excluding photographs), Yearbooks, Photographs, and Newspapers. While the Miscellaneous Archives and Photographs collections incorporate materials dating from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the Visual Media, Yearbooks, and Newspapers collections are reflective only of September 1968-May 1971, a particularly tumultuous period for the university. For these three collections, particularly Newspapers, I endeavored to provide a comprehensive representation of the sources in an effort to expose how the Vietnam War fused with other student movements to permeate the URI campus in a myriad of unexpected ways.
Why URI?
Early studies of the antiwar protests on college campuses tended to focus on elite, urban colleges and universities, often institutions that were in coastal states (with a few obvious exceptions, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison). The last twenty to thirty years has exhibited a shift towards examining the impact of the antiwar movement on rural, state schools, a refocusing that tends to concentrate on schools in the Midwest and occasionally the South. The University of Rhode Island is a unique blend of these two profiles: it is in a coastal state, however it is also a rural, public university.
A quick overview of the history of the University of Rhode Island during the late 1960s and early 1970s would reveal a series of predictable events and experiences for an American university during this period. Debates over parietals, civil rights demonstrations, discussions of diversity and race, hempfests, demands for student rights, and, of course, antiwar protests all became part of the campus culture at URI during these years.
However, a close observer would begin to note other less obvious changes. Throughout the lifespan of the Vietnam War (which, if we measure from the withdrawal of the French to the fall of Saigon, ran 1954-1975), three different men served as college presidents for URI, reflecting terms that ran significantly shorter than the 11-year average for URI presidents. Both the college newspaper and yearbook adopted new names during the Vietnam War, dropping monikers they had born since the 1890s. Woven throughout this were debates over whether the ROTC program, which had a long history at the university, should be discontinued.
None of these changes came emblazoned with the message “Outcome of the Vietnam War,” yet they were clearly symptomatic of a great upheaval that challenged the university’s traditional infrastructure and campus culture during these decades. As evidence from the university suggests, if the campuses were about to blow, the reasons for this were complex and the fallout would have a profound effect on all aspects of student and university life.