A Question of Venue

One of the critical questions that journalists and scholars from disciplines such as history and sociology have asked about the student protests against the Vietnam War is why they erupted in the late 1960s when the United States had been growing increasingly embroiled in Cold War conflicts and proxy wars since the conclusion of World War II.  Although demonstrations occurred on college campuses prior to the late 1960s, the radical increase in the number of rallies, marches, teach-ins, and class boycotts during this period left both scholars and the media at a loss to explain the reasons for this transformation in student engagement with American involvement in the Vietnam War.  In analyzing potential explanations for this change, sociologists and social historians emerged as some of the earliest voices to explore this outbreak of anti-war activism across college and university campuses.  With their interest in social groups and structures, sociologists and social historians probed the attitudes and ideologies of college students, attempting to analyze them within the context of college campus culture.  Many of these scholars argued that student protest was a direct product of the college environments.   

One of the first monographs that attempted to explore the social context of the student activism on college campuses was political scientist and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset’s Rebellion in the University, which was published in the early 1970s.  Lipset acknowledged that three events or factors were commonly-touted during this period as the stimuli for student protests: political catalysts, such as the war itself; societal factors, including new parenting techniques and the growing popularity of “progressive” schools; and historical catalysts that involve a reaction to events that are both historical and political.[1]  While Lipset incorporated elements from each of these arguments, he emphasized how these factors operated together within the context of the college campus, a liminal space in which students were neither children nor adults.  

Because professors frequently assumed roles as political activists, advisers, and consultants, colleges and universities were important political centers in the 1960s; yet, with most students under the voting age (set at 21 until 1971), students had little share in the political status of their institutions.  Lipset suggested that students struggled to develop a culture “outside of and in opposition to that of most of the adults” in order to express their own separate identities.[2]  Despite this, Lipset also claimed that many students continued to align their political ideologies and concerns with those of college faculty members, who typically ascribed to liberal politics and ideologies (in regard to the Vietnam War, particularly after the Tet Offensive).[3]  As a social scientist, Lipset utilized social science data, such as national polls from the 1960s, to indicate that the most student radicals came from liberal, wealthy families; and, as a result of this privileged status, they rebelled while in positions of relative safety.  In this way, Lipset’s research indicates that college campus culture and the privileged background of radical student activists profoundly impacted the development of student protests in the 1960s. 

Lipset’s research and sociological framework for understanding the student activism on college campuses is one of the early foundational pieces of research on student movements during the 1960s, including the student anti-war movement.  However, other scholars, like sociologist E.M. Schreiber, have built upon Lipset’s research and come to different conclusions concerning the impact of college campus culture on these student protests of American involvement in Vietnam.  Like Lipset, Schreiber contended that the Tet Offensive assumed a critical role in turning American sentiment against the Vietnam War.  However, Schreiber claimed that the majority of American universities experienced no anti-war protests during the 1960s and early 1970s.  He argued that only a small number of college students participated in anti-war protests during this period, suggesting that this small sample had been distorted to suggest that a greater number of college students were active in the anti-war movement than actually were.[4]  

Incorporating data from three major national institutional surveys of the 1960s, Schreiber claimed that the student activism of the late 1960s should not be taken as representative of a general political outrage reflected equally across a college population of students, faculty members, and administrators.  He maintained that “student and faculty activism in the 1960s probably was fostered by the atmosphere of official tolerance of non-violent dissent” and the affluent, well-educated social identity of the protesters.[5]  While Schreiber’s analysis does bear some similarities to future research that focuses on the influence of a lenient college campus culture to the formation of the student anti-war movement, later scholars shifted their attention to identifying pre-1960s college campuses as “non-political” rather than “tolerant.”[6]  Additionally, his analysis fails to acknowledge any diversity amongst student anti-war activists, an unexpected shortcoming given that college campuses continued to see civil rights activism during this same period.

Unlike Lipset and Schreiber who pointed to the tolerant and apolitical characteristics of college campuses as providing an ideal environment for mounting student protests against the war, Adam Bateman maintained that college campuses actually had a long history of tension with the military that made them ideally suited to become hotbeds of dissent against the Vietnam War.  Because the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 had required all land-grant colleges to provide training in military tactics, college administration and students were especially aware of the military and debates over the value of a standing army.[7]   Many colleges had developed ROTC programs to supplement this training.  Bateman suggests that the unique positioning of student protesters near students in the ROTC program heightened tensions at many universities.[8]  Although opposition toward the military had weakened during World War II, teach-ins at colleges and universities followed Johnson’s deployment of Marines to South Vietnam and fueled the resistance to the Vietnam War. 

Lipset, Schreiber, and Bateman each point to the anti-war protests on college campuses as emerging from a campus culture that shaped the student anti-war movement, whether through its toleration or its long history of tension with the military.  While Schreiber downplayed the social, economic, and ethnic diversity of student anti-war protesters in his overemphasis on the role of a tolerant college atmosphere, Lipset and Bateman were more effective in their assessments of the role of the college campus as venue for anti-war activism due to their acknowledgement of the liberal sentiments and skepticism of the military that preceded student protests of Vietnam.  However, while these arguments provide a useful analysis of college campus culture in the 1960s and 1970s, they at times border on overstating the impact of college administration, faculty members, and overall culture on the protests of the Vietnam War.  As a result, they often diminish the agency of the student participants as well as underestimate the connections between anti-war activism and other movements of this period.

Venue: URI in the 1960s

The 1950s had been a period of immense growth for the University of Rhode Island, which received its university status...