Shattered Tranquility Vietnam War Stirred Apolitical Campus from Slumber

Author: Deborah Jones

Middlebury College has never been considered a hotbed of political activity. Its own students regularly describe the atmosphere as "sleepy," "detached," and "bubbled-in." Those who dare to shatter the quiet are a minority that is sometimes scorned for disrupting this remote paradise. "Protest" is something that is debated; "activism" is something that occurs elsewhere.
Or is this trend changing? Since Sept. 11, The Campus' Opinions section has seen a storm of submissions on national and international issues. New student organizations and traditions, such as The New Left, Middlebury Initiative for Sustainable Development and "24 Hours for Peace," have sprung up and found their niches in record time. In one week last April, various groups of students spoke out against discrimination at "The Art of Kissing" show, handed out pamphlets at a lecture by a World Bank official and orchestrated a "die-in" protest when CIA recruiters came to campus. Over 1,000 people marched on Mead Chapel in an event organized by the Middlebury community's "United for Peace" campaign in October when White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer '82 visited his alma mater. Some experts say that the seed has been planted for a new generation of protesters.
This picture appears to mirror that of Middlebury in its most tumultuous years, the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Paging through the archives of The Campus, one observes the rapid development of youth culture and the protest movement. By the late '60s, neat layouts, tasteful portraits and reports on Student Government Association meetings give way to a psychedelic masthead, candid photos of longhaired youths and blaring headlines condemning assassinations, the draft, the war and the campus presence of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC).
While Middlebury may not have been the political hotbed that larger, more urban schools like Harvard, Berkley and the University of Michigan were, the energy of the era did not bypass the Green Mountains. Steve Early '70, former managing editor of The Campus and current labor union lawyer, noted that "Middlebury ranked well in the '60s activism department with Wesleyan University, Amherst College and Williams College, its peer group to this day."
Anti-war, anti-draft and anti-ROTC groups all found a home at Middlebury, as did the omnipresent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The largest and most durable organization, according to Early, was Radical Education and Action Project (REAP), formed in the fall of 1971 and operating into the middle of the decade. Rallies were held, demonstrations were made and op-eds written. The pages of The Campus from that time are saturated with articles about Vietnam, as well as appeals for environmental consciousness, women's rights and socially responsible investment of endowment money, issues that prior to that era were hardly mainstream causes.
In the fall of 1969, 200 students — more than 10 percent of the student body — headed to Washington, D.C., for the November Mobilization march following the October Moratorium. Yet, in Early's mind, Middlebury didn't really join the movement until May 1970, following the Kent State University (Ohio) shootings (May 4, 1970).
A piece Early wrote for Middlebury Magazine in the spring of 1990 describes the campus' reaction to National Guardsmen's gunning down four students protesting the April 30, 1970, U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The College was one of 500 schools nationwide to cancel classes for the purpose of alleviating personal and community distress in the wake of the tragedy. During the days of "the strike," Early wrote, "the bulletin boards and corridors of Proctor Hall became a kind of 'Democracy Wall' — papered with the latest news clippings, leaflets, posters, sign up sheets and reports from other campuses. Telephone and computer contact was established and maintained with the 'National Strike Information Center' at Brandeis University and a host of strike start-up organizations." The late Erica Wonnacott, then dean of students, recalled the strike as a time when the most distinct members of the Middlebury community "stayed up all night talking together … trying to understand what was going on."
Kent State, explained Early, provoked more shock, anger and outrage at the College than ever before because "the casualties of war (at home) were now people most students could relate to – nice middle-class kids, just like themselves, rather than the working class U.S. soldiers and the Vietnamese peasants who'd been dying in much larger numbers for years." Middlebury College records losing five students in the Vietnam War; an indeterminate number served. Many students avoided the draft by obtaining deferments for undergraduate and postgraduate education.
Peace and togetherness were interrupted, however, on May 7, when a student — apparently emotionally disturbed rather than politically motivated — set fire to Recitation Hall, a wood-framed building previously located behind Carr Hall. The arson incident exacerbated tensions between the College and the community, as well as within the student body itself. Vermont governor-elect Jim Douglas '72, then a leader of the Middlebury Young Republicans, stated in a 1976 interview with The Campus, "It was only a minority who wanted to shut down academic activity. A total cessation of classes might well have been avoided if some of the leaders in Old Chapel had been a bit more level headed." A compromise was reached to resume classes May 7.
The "uproar" of the spring of 1970 faded by the following fall and "the campus went to sleep again" to be stirred from its slumber only by REAP, which Early explained, "started to crank things up more systematically." The spring of 1971 saw 25 Middlebury students and one faculty member arrested and temporarily jailed in Washington, D.C. during the "May Day" demonstration. About 50 to 60 Middlebury students attended that protest, which resulted in a round-up of 7,000 participants, the largest single mass arrest in one day in U.S. history.
Yet perhaps Middlebury was not destined to be a political center, and Early, in a Dec. 3, 1970, editorial expressing his disappointment with the lack of activism, wrote, "The very group which should be most aware of what is really happening has fallen silent. Students and members of the academic community in general, at Middlebury and elsewhere, have seemingly accepted the Nixon consensus and come to assume that someone, somewhere is 'winding down the war.'"
So the College on the Hill receded into tranquility once more, its collective consciousness stirred only sporadically. The question then becomes, what would it take for it to wake once more?