Introduction

“The Campuses are Gonna Blow”: Anti-War Protest at American Colleges and Universities during the Vietnam War^[1]

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, universities across the United States experienced waves of protest against the Vietnam War.  These protests occurred at a pivotal moment in American history: a moment in which protests for equal rights for women, African Americans, and other minority groups were simultaneously erupting across the nation.  These movements, along with emerging environmental and student rights movements, permeated college and university campuses throughout the country.  Merging idealism, a commitment to equality, and a growing skepticism of the government and other institutional authorities, these movements and protests were not isolated from each other.  Instead, they shared a culture of rebellion.  In many ways, student protests against the Vietnam War encapsulated all of these movements.  These protests voiced concerns for the environment in response to the use of Agent Orange and extensive bombing in Vietnam and Cambodia, and they questioned the white, middle-class, Judeo-Christian, male worldview that undermined struggles for human and civil rights.  Additionally, because these protests transpired on college campuses, they raised critical questions about the role of college students and their rights at institutes of higher education, especially during times of national and social upheaval.

Both academics and non-academics have contributed to telling the history of the student anti-war movement.  Representing different disciplines and professions such as history, sociology, journalism, and film-making, these researchers have generated scholarly and popular work on the development of the anti-war movement on college campuses.  This body of work explores many facets of the student movement against the Vietnam War, including how college culture shaped the movement, the identity and backgrounds of student participants, motives for protest, and the impact the protests had on college campuses as well as on American perceptions of college students.  However, this research can, at the very least, be broken into four distinctive categories that reflect major paradigms within the historiography of the student anti-war movement. 

First, the initial wave of inquiry and scholarship that explored the outbreak of the student anti-war protests suggests that college campus culture was the primary factor shaping the nature and emergence of these protests.  Advocates of this model contend that the nature of the mid-twentieth-century American college campus made this venue ripe for student protest.  As a result, this research often emphasizes the role of campus administration and culture and the evolution of college campuses, exploring how these elements impacted college students during the period between World War II and the Vietnam War.  Second, shifting away from this research that stressed the impact of the college environment on the emergence of student anti-war protests, scholarship and popular literature began to examine these protests as intricately intertwined with other social movements and protests of the late 1950s and the 1970s.  These studies explore the tactics, strategies, and goals were where shared across student movements in this tumultuous period.  Third, in the 1990s, some scholarship began to challenge the previous assumptions that anti-war protests occurred primarily at large, elite colleges on the East Coast and West Coast.  Academics were largely responsible for this trend, and they endeavored to incorporate smaller, rural colleges and universities into the history of student anti-war protests in order to create a broader and more complex understanding of student anti-war activism.  Finally, in more recent years, an analysis of diverse, individual motives for anti-war activism has entered popular literature and research.  Based on personal narratives and oral interviews, this body of work points to a complex network of motives, goals, and individual experiences that guided the actions of college students who participated in protests of the Vietnam War.