1960s in American Society

Students at Kent State University in Ohio in any casek part in a series of actions over the spend following that Thursday night speech, and among the actions taken were the breaking of windows in the business district and the burning of the Army ROTC building on the campus. The governor ordered the Ohio National Guard to the campus as a law of nature action on Monday, and it was this which would lead to the shooting by National Guardsmen of several disciples (Morrison and Morrison 329).

This was not the first violent skirmish that had taken place on a college campus, for beginning with the bump Speech Movement in the 1960s at Berkeley, college campuses had been a battleground in the fight betwixt the Establishment and the counter-culture. The grounds was typified by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and similar groups. The SDS had originated as a youth-oriented organization dedicated to a strategy of student mobilization to down its semipolitical program. It was founded with the Port Huron Statement in 1962. The issue that made SDS a national organization was the Vietnam War, encounter to which started as a student-centered antiwar campaign and then changed to a broad-based coalition. SDS disintegrated in 1969 as the result of internal factionalization. The New Left stool continued, however, and had a profound impact on educational institutions:

There was a chapter of SDS at Kent State, and it had worked to implement a radical program integrating its anticapitalist critique with its antiwar stance. Its cash advance included attacks on the administrative structure of the university and charged complicity between the University and corporate interests. It also demanded the expulsion of the ROTC from the campus. The Kent State version of SDS faint-hearted along with the national organization. This was after the SDS attended a hear at the Music and Speech Building and tried to take out down the hearing, being held to consider discipline for earlier protests. University police tried to seal the building and arrested 58 people.

For the administration, this incident elicited concern about the ability of the University to deal with prolonged and vociferous protest, and President Robert White said that the University would follow a insurance of arrests and suspension for anyone involved in future disruptions. He authoritative much support from within the University, but it was also real that some students and faculty saw the policy as too inflexible (Bills 8-9).

oposals for the democratization of university decision-making and the elimination of military-related academic and research programs veritable strong support from many students and faculty. . . Kent State University was not excluded from the political upheaval of this period (Bills 8).

Since that time, though, some of this position has been changed, and the event form a sad one for the University and many in the commonplace:

Zaroulis, Nancy and Gerald Sullivan. Who Spoke Up? Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1984.

The Kent State killings were in many ways the culmination of a decade of campus protest, and the reaction of the government demonstrated how little it understood the depth of sentiment against the war and other issues that existed at that time. It also showed how paranoid the leading could be when confronted with any opposition.

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