Students speak out A look at Middlebury's politically active past

Author: Thomas Brant

At 7 a.m. on the morning of May 5, 1970, first-year Howard Burchman picked up the phone in the WRMC-FM office. His vision was blurry and his voice probably sounded tired. He had been up all night, his eyes glued to the radio station's teletype feed, which was spitting out bits and pieces of news about the Vietnam War protest a day earlier at Kent State University in Ohio. He knew that four students had been shot by police, and like hundreds of thousands of other college students across the country on May 5, Burchman knew they could not die in vain. The voice on the other end of the line finally answered, and Burchman told Dean of the College Dennis O'Brian that he and other students wanted a suspension of classes and a memorial service for the Kent State four. He got his wish at noon, when the College Council assembled in a special meeting and voted to suspend classes until the following Monday. But Burchman did not go back to his room and catch up on much-needed sleep. In fact, he and other Middlebury students were busier in the next few days than they had probably been all year. They pushed aside schoolwork and grumpiness over the recent snowfall and turned their attention to rallies, protests ... and arson. The Strike of May 1970 had begun.



Five Days in May

Why did Middlebury care so much about political activism during the volatile 1960s and '70s? It sure seems like modern Middlebury students kick back their heels and crack open their books in their own personal bubbles inside of a larger bubble that seals off the campus from the rest of the world. Students occasionally hear stories about the College Democrats chasing votes for Hillary or Obama or read in the spaghetti-splattered events schedule in Ross that the College Republicans have brought another conservative speaker to campus. What makes our 1970s counterparts so different?

The students' reaction to the shootings at Kent State holds some of the answers. It revealed their deep connection with the anti-war movements taking place at other colleges and universities across the nation.

"As the words of the Kent State killings spread across this campus, the students were deeply shocked and in despair," Gregor Hileman, editor of the Middlebury Magazine, wrote that summer. "Suddenly feeling themselves a threatened minority, they urgently desired some symbolic expression of solidarity with each other, with the faculty, and with their peers at other schools."

For the rest of the week and into the weekend, the students expressed their solidarity by holding protests, rallies, canvassing nearby towns, cutting their hair and pretty much any other way they could think of. The protests were organized and well -attended - not just by the dreadlocked hippies, but also by students, faculty and members of the College and town community.

At 7:30 p.m., on the same day that Burchman set the strike in motion, Mead Chapel was jammed to the rafters with students and faculty who gathered to mourn the deaths of the Kent State Four. The College chaplain uttered a few remarks, the College choir sang and the memorial service ended with the hymn "Turn back, O man, forsake thy foolish ways."

Then the real rally began.

The students, jammed inside the chapel like sardines, stuck around until 10:45 p.m., listening to speeches by professors, students and political activists. Andrew Wentink '70, now the Curator of Special Collections and Archives, remembered the electric atmosphere of the rallies.

"What was extraordinary was that the entire student body as well as the faculty came together and spoke passionately," he said. "The initial feeling after the Kent State [deaths] was 'What difference is a protest at Middlebury going to make?' But I think over time there was a consensus that we should join other students and universities in protesting the war."

They were still at it early the next morning in Proctor Hall, the organizers' informal headquarters. Organizers set up a "strike information center" on May 6, and no one rushed past the tables on their way to make panninis. Fifty or 60 people were milling about, some wearing red rags torn into armbands, others reading posters taped to the walls with information from the WRMC teletype machine that detailed how their fellow students across America were dealing with the turmoil in the wake of the shooting. Students also paid attention to signs that called for action on campus and around town.

"We need 60 people every night for the next three days to patrol this campus. Sign up!" one sign loudly proclaimed.

"Sign petition to Senator Prouty," another commanded.

At 11 a.m., a second rally was held in Mead Chapel (Proctor's terrace was ruled out because of the snow and sleet). The downstairs pews filled quickly and left students peering around rafters in the balcony to see the speakers. One student read a letter explaining to her professors why she was going to skip her classes for the rest of the year to help the anti-war cause.

'I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad'

But the next morning, students awoke to some bad news. It seemed that the politically charged atmosphere was taking an ugly turn.

At 4:15 a.m. on May 7, someone had broken the glass entrance to Recitation Hall, poured gasoline on rags at the base of the walls and touched them off. Flames quickly leapt up the staircase and enveloped the attic of the small World War I-era wooden building. Fire engines from Middlebury and Vergennes screeched to the site 15 minutes later, but it was too late. By the time the flames were gone, they had gutted the building, and with it the main rooms of Middlebury's Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) center. It turned out that it was the third attempt to vandalize ROTC offices at Middlebury that week. Public Safety officers had foiled previous break-in attempts at the ROTC headquarters in Alumni House on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

"Initially there was great shock and concern" about the Recitation fire, Wentink recalled. But since the building was slated for demolition anyway, he and other students believed that it was an appropriate, albeit dramatic protest.

"The majority of students felt that if something was going to be burned down, it might as well be Recitation Hall, because it was expendable," Wentink said.

But the vandalism did not end there. Later that day, someone had spray-painted the word "scab" on the set of the upcoming play "Alice in Wonderland," one of the few events scheduled to take place during the strike and cancellation of classes. The word scab implied that the show was breaking the strike, but that was not true, according to Wentnick, who played the Cheshire Cat.

"Some people thought that such a play was superficial and shouldn't go on in light of what was happening around the country," he said. "But the truth was, the interpretation we made of the [script] was very loose." The actors had in fact turned the play into a subtle war protest of their own.

"We felt that in times of national crisis, it was important that art make a statement against the establishment," Wentink said. "One of my lines as the Cheshire Cat was 'I'm mad, you're mad, we're all mad."

The cast and crew slept in Wright Theater to avoid any further damage to the set, and when the curtain rose that weekend, it revealed a sold-out and appreciative audience.

On Monday at 9 a.m., classes resumed. The Strike of 1970 was over.



No 'emotional commitment'

The Five Days in May might have represented the zenith of political activism at Middlebury. Barely 10 years later, students were already beginning to feel comfortably isolated in the bubble that we know so well today. Marion Lee '80 put it a little more bluntly in a 1979 interview with The Middlebury Campus.

"You could drop a bomb on New York City and it wouldn't affect the people
up here," she said.

Rick Glaser, who wrote the column in which Lee's quote appeared, agreed with her. He noted that students no longer had an "emotional commitment" towards activism.

"There are four reasons, I believe, why this campus is politically stagnant," Glaser wrote. "First, the student body is unaware and uninformed of what is going on. Second, there is no unifying issue. Third, Middlebury is not an urban center and therefore attracts less politically active people, and finally, there is the ever-present problem of inflation. For good or for bad, Middlebury is in the Stone Age when it comes to political activism."

Nearly 30 years after Glaser wrote those words, it seems that the College is still politically stagnant. This time around, however, inflation is not as much of a problem and the 2008 elections certainly serve as a unifying issue. Where is our campus activism, then?

Emily Gullickson '10, president of the College Democrats, believes that some of it may be taking a back seat to individual political projects.

"People just dedicate all of their time to a single cause instead of engaging in political activism," she said.

The priorities of students and administrators alike are partly to blame. Everything from the Projects for Peace fund, designed to help students pursue world peace, to the enormously demanding workload seem to tell the modern Middlebury student that college is for studying, and his or her own time is for political projects. Maybe that is just how the majority of students want to spend their four years here. But for those who are looking to stir the pot of campus activism, remember that the extraordinary events of the Five Days in May 1970 were started with a single phone call at 7 a.m.