While published research concerning the student anti-Vietnam movement was meager during the 1980s, an alternate trend began to emerge in the late 1990s and continued to gain popularity in the early 2000s.[1] Building upon previous research that had explored the critical impact of college culture on shaping the student anti-war movement, this new trend in scholarship and popular literature suggested that the primary significance of the college campus was in connecting the student anti-war protests and protesters to other student movements and demonstrations of the 1960s. Juxtaposing the student anti-war movement with other movements like civil rights, women’s liberation, and the broader student rights movement, this literature endeavored to situate the anti-war movement within a period of upheaval and rebellion in American colleges and universities, often exploring the strategies, goals, and motives that were shared across student movements.
In Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject, a popular history of student resistance, English professor Mark Boren placed study of the student anti-war protests within a long, global history of student movements. Although his sweeping scope often relegates specific movements into an almost encyclopedic treatment, Boren’s application of psychoanalytic theory to understand the dynamics of student rebellion creates a useful theoretical framework for understanding student resistance. By exploring student movements on college campuses around the world, Boren examines key trends in the birth and evolution of student movements. He suggests that a student movement progresses beyond its formative state when it creates a crisis of a magnitude that requires a response from authorities, who could be parents, administrators, the police, or military forces.[2] Because the response of authorities propels participants within the student movement into a new context for their activism, these students often find themselves at the center of “extremely powerful sociological, political, and physical forces for which they are generally unprepared.”[3] He imposes this pattern on the student movement against the Vietnam War to explain its lifecycle, highlighting how major demonstrations at schools like Columbia University and Berkeley allowed the anti-war movement to gain momentum on a national level before struggling in response to new problems like the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, internal discord concerning the overall goals and tactics of the anti-war movement, as well as the rising animosity of the general American public toward the student protesters.[4]
Placing the student anti-war movement within the context of global student movements, Boren is not only able to create a useful paradigm for understanding the evolution of student resistance to the war and its later struggles, but he is also able to explain why so many Americans strongly repudiated and disparaged the students who protested the Vietnam War. He indicates that media coverage of student involvement in extremist groups like the Weathermen Underground intensified disapproval of student activists, leading to a widespread development of sentiments that were “anti-anti-war, anti-civil-rights, anticounterculture, and antistudent.”[5] Historian David Schalk identified a similar outcome in his scholarly monograph War and the Ivory Tower, although he emphasizes a shift towards anti-intellectualism that would peak during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.[6] As illustrated by Boren and Schalk, contempt for the anti-war protests on college campuses was part of a prevalent disdain for student activism that took root in the late 1960s and gained momentum in the following decades.
Although Boren’s depiction of the similarities shared between the student anti-war movement and other contemporary student movements provides a useful paradigm for understanding the evolution of student movements on college and university campuses, historian and political scientist Caroline Hoefferle more effectively clarifies how student participants in the anti-war protests built on previous student movements. She argues that the civil rights movement student anti-war activists “a language and tactics with which to confront those in authority.”[7] While Hoefferle’s characterization of college campus culture as apolitical prior to the 1960s is reminiscent of Schreiber, she contends that it was exposure to other nonviolent student movements and the violent responses that they often envoked that motivated students to respond to the Vietnam War and the ethical implications of American involvement. In its early years, the anti-war movement borrowed heavily from the non-violent tactics of the civil rights movement, with leaders of the movement organizing teach-ins, sit-ins, and peaceful rallies and marches to provide students with an opportunity to discuss and respond to wartime atrocities.[8]
By refusing to simplify the student movement against the Vietnam War into a mere product of a tolerant college environment, Hoefferle develops a complex portrayal of the movement, its early strategies, and its supporters. While affirming that many protesters were leftist students who questioned the legitimacy of the war and the anticommunist stance of United States foreign policy, Hoefferle also demonstrates that many religious students became involved in the anti-war movement. These students found that the violence and injustice of the Vietnam War violated the principles of their faith. Hoefferle’s examination of the diversity of student anti-war protesters as well as the anti-war protesters’ ties to other student movements suggests that it was the broad appeal of the anti-war demonstrations that made them so prevalent and popular on college campuses.
Analyzing the student anti-war movement within the context of other movements that appeared on college campuses during the 1950s-1970s provides a more comprehensive understanding of student concerns and actions during this period; however, it also offers insight into why so many Americans responded negatively to the student anti-war protesters. Americans outside the “ivory tower” were responding to ongoing upheavals that were culminating in race riots, bombings, and violent protests that had challenged the social fabric of the nation. The insulated environment of the college campus as well as the ability of the anti-war movement to incorporate the tactics and appeal to the supporters of other student movements only increased animosity towards the student anti-war protesters. However, as illustrated by Boren and Hoefferle, it was this aptitude for fusing tactics and ideals that allowed the anti-war movement to develop a broad base of support on college campuses.
Time: A Period of Revolution
The anti-war movement was only one of many movements emerging on the URI campus during the 1960s and 1970s. The...
[1] While it is difficult to say with absolute authority why research on the student anti-war movement dwindled during the 1980s, it seems likely that it was a response to the rise of the political right (corresponding with the presidency of Ronald Reagan), which was dismissive of both students’ movements and the New Left. A widespread desire to move past the Vietnam War as both an unpopular war and a war that failed to end with an American win has also likely impacted this inattention.
[2] Mark Boren, Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Boren ties the rising militancy of the anti-war movement to that of other groups like the Black Panthers to explain a growing antipathy felt towards protesters by the general American public. See Boren, Student Resistance, 182-183.
[5] Ibid., 188.
[6] David Schalk, War and the Ivory Tower (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7-8. It should be noted that because Schalk published his book in the early 1990s, he identified the peak in anti-intellectualism that had occurred by that time. The impending presidency of Donald Trump could possibly, and indeed is likely to, supplant Reagan’s presidency as the new peak of anti-intellectualism
[7] Hoefferle, “Students and Political Activism,” 187.
[8] One shortcoming in Hoefferle’s research is her failure to acknowledge early violent incidents in the anti-war movement, such as the bombing at Southern Illinois University in 1968 and a wave of bombings in early 1970. Instead, she focuses on the emergence of violence following the Kent State shootings in May 1970.