Campus Unrest Research Articles

Kent State in Context

The year 2020 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the May 4th tragedy at Kent State University. This article reviews the use of the National Guard in campus disorders from 1965 through June 1970 in order to identify factors that contributed to its effectiveness and to the likelihood of Guard violence. The Guard was most successful in dealing with disorders that most resembled urban riots earlier in the 1960s. The Guard was successful in controlling more complex situations only when the official enforcement code was altered to suit the unique situation of the campus. The difficulties the Guard encountered at Kent State are seen to be typical of the campus unrest incidents of that period where the campus was kept open, while the unjustifiable Guard violence at Kent State was quite exceptional.

How and Why the Chicago Principles Came to Canada: Free Expression on Campus and the Closing of the “Campus Crisis Feedback Loop”

ABSTRACT Like the United States, Canada has experienced heightened concerns related to free expression on university campuses. In response, two Conservative provincial governments issued directives (in Ontario in 2018 and in Alberta in 2019) based on the Chicago Principles, compelling higher-education institutions to create explicit policy statements. Using a comparative and historical approach, I present an analytical framework for understanding the emergence of the directives. I argue that the successful California gubernatorial campaigning of Ronald Reagan created a “campus crisis feedback loop” that includes the mutually reinforcing phenomena of campus unrest, sensationalistic news coverage, overwhelmingly negative public opinion, and partisan opportunities to channel negative public opinion. The feedback loop subsequently became a pillar of conservative discourse and politics. The analysis demonstrates that while both countries experienced campus unrest, Canada has not traditionally responded with government intervention. Thus, the importation of the Chicago Principles led to a final closing of the feedback loop in Canada.

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Review Essay: Kent State at Fifty

Spending privilege through genuine relationships: Co‐navigating campus unrest and intergroup tensions

AbstractAs educators, we each hold privileged and minoritized identities which can be leveraged to navigate difficulties across difference. In the article below, we discuss how working in coalition across professional relationships might help educators navigate intergroup tensions on campus. We offer strategies for higher education professionals to develop genuine relationships that address campus inequities.

Kent State, Jackson State, Campus Unrest, and Shifts in the Cultural Paradigm

Kent State, Jackson State, Campus Unrest, and Shifts in the Cultural Paradigm

An Integrated Model for Improving the Performance of Engineering Institutes under Multiple External and Internal Disruptions

In the last sixty years many affiliated and autonomous colleges, and national institutes have faced a large number of external and internal disruptions, campus unrest, disputes, court cases and even punishment to the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). Many disruptions are due to multiple external controls from central and state governments, affiliating universities, councils (AICTE and Governing Councils), commissions (UGC, and other Commissions) and authoritative politicians. All these disruptions resulted in low performing institutes. This further aggravated due to improper selection of the CEOs of the institutes/universities, and chairpersons of the Board of Governors. A qualitative research has been undertaken to critically review the state of affairs and suggest strategies, models and solutions to overcome the multiple disruptions through quality circles constituted as a part of faculty development programs on institutional development, leadership and innovation. A four- stage model has been developed. In the first stage the external disruptions have to be minimized, in the second stage the internal disruptions are to be eliminated, in the third stage establishing facilitating centers for rapid transformation, and a fourth stage for implementing transformation initiatives are to be done. Without implementing the three stage reforms, the desired transformations may not be achieved.

Who is the student athlete? Focusing on positioning in the campus unrest period in Japan

This study aims to clarify the process by which student athletes in Japan were socially classified during the period of campus unrest. To this end, a constructionist discourse analysis was conducted using newspaper and magazine articles, as well as materials published by the Japanese Ministry of Education. This analysis revealed two key factors in this social construction process: first, there was public concern regarding the thuggery exhibited by student athletes during the campus unrest period; second, there was public concern regarding the semi-professionalisation of student athletes during the subsequent university reforms. These factors engendered the perception of student athletes as thuggish and disinterested in their studies, which in turn negatively affected the activities and organisational structures of varsity teams. Eventually, this perception prompted student athletes to be dubbed ‘sport council types’ (taiikukai-kei), solidifying their social classification as a special category distinct from regular students.

Good students & bad activists: The moral economy of campus unrest

Contemporary critical scholarship on the university firmly places new discursive and curricular formations within a global context of neoliberal, neoimperial, and neocolonial processes. Recently, some focus has been given to last century’s institutionalization of the interdisciplines (e.g. Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies) and how the invitation to become a part of the university has mapped onto repressive liberal fantasies of tolerance and inclusion. With this history in mind, this paper begins with the current wave of student protests and how the institutionalization of difference has structured university responses to new formations of critique. We argue that, though de-escalating the politics of knowledge production and legitimation, a new moral economy has emerged in which universities trade on ‘good’ students who adhere to prescribed performances of critique and villainize the student–activists who threaten the status quo as a means to manage current crises while retaining social legitimacy.

Using Dialogue to Navigate Controversy, Civility, and Community.

Overlaying literature on facilitating dialogue and campus crisis management, this chapter introduces dialogue as an effective tool for both administrative and student leaders to engage during times of campus unrest, and offers implications for the work of leadership educators.

#FeesMustFall2016: Perceived and measured effect on clinical medical students.

Medical students are under immense academic stress. Campus unrest can contribute to stress and influence academic performance, social behaviour, emotional stability and financial expenses. To investigate the effects of #FeesMustFall2016 (#FMF2016) on the 2016 3rd-year (semester 6) clinical medical students at the University of the Free State (UFS), Bloemfontein, South Africa. In phase 1 of the project, anonymous questionnaires were completed by the clinical students who experienced physical test disruption during #FMF2016. Opinions regarding academic performance, financial expenses, behaviour changes and stress levels were gathered. The students also completed a formal post-traumatic stress screening assessment. In phase 2 of the project, the academic performance of these students was compared with that of students not affected by #FMF2016. Of the target population of 138 students, 87.0% completed the questionnaires. Three-quarters of the respondents reported a negative effect on academic performance, and most did not believe that the delivering of lectures on Blackboard was a good way of training. Alcohol consumption increased in 31.9% of the students. Criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were met in 12.7% of students. Compared with previous and later cohorts of students there were no clear differences regarding marks, but there was a tendency towards poorer performance and more failures the next year. Semester 6 medical students at UFS reported that the #FMF2016 protests had a negative effect on academic, social, financial and stress aspects. PTSD was present in 12.7% of students compared with 7.8% in similar populations.

Students, their Protests, and their Organizations. Exploring Old Gaps and New Evidence

While introducing the four contributions to the special issue Students, their protests, and their organizations: exploring old gaps and new evidence, we link them with influential literature on students' protests and their organizations. The 'old gaps' refer to the long-standing divide between two traditions of research in students' collective action: social movements and organizational studies. The 'new evidence' refers to the finding that studentship is not conducive to protests (Oana 2019a), while the father's education is a strong predictor. While the 'agentic' character of studentship is one important presumption behind many arguments making sense of campus unrest, this finding does not invalidate it as such, but rather indicates that selection to higher education, and not campus socialization, may be conducive to this form of political participation.

Making The Tain, 1951–70: Thomas Kinsella, Louis le Brocquy, and Liam Miller

Making The Tain, 1951–70:Thomas Kinsella, Louis le Brocquy, and Liam Miller Thomas Dillon Redshaw The pertinence of the Táin Bó Cúailnge to the nationalist projects of Yeats's Literary Revival and Pearse's Rising has become a commonplace of Irish history—a commonplace reinforced by each glimpse of Oliver Sheppard's 1914 bronze "The Dying Cúchulain" in Dublin's General Post Office. Cúchulainn's stature as a hero as large in the imagination as any figure in the Iliad or the Niebenlungenlied is today tempered by the postmodern reader's awareness of Simone Weil's conviction, presented in her essay on the Iliad, that heroism engages a necessary dehumanization.1 The three monastic recensions of the Irish epic's portrayal of La Tène-era Ireland present a world utterly disordered by willful human appetites: the tale foregrounds Medb's domineering ascendancy and Aillil's compliance, the unmanning of Fergus Mac Roich, the failure of the ethic of single combat to avert slaughter, and the exhaustion of that society's prepotency. Like all such tales, the Táin is a tale of troubled times. For those reasons and more, the Táin Bó Cúailnge retains its status as a "world classic"—and, in fact, Oxford University Press keeps it in print under that rubric in Thomas Kinsella's translation The Tain, first published by Liam Miller's Dolmen Press in 1969. The story of the creation of the Dolmen Tain remains deeply relevant to Irish literary, artistic, and cultural history: Kinsella's translation, Louis le Brocquy's brush drawings, and Miller's design of the book went immediately to the very center of Irish literary, artistic, and cultural life in the early 1970s. Kinsella's translation helped support the income and reputation of the Dolmen Press in the 1970s. Almost fifty years later, as an Oxford World's Classics paperback, The Tain offers to readers worldwide an informed and informative translation of the epic. It continues to give substance to the Celtic fantasies drawn by Jim Fitzpatrick, to the many children's versions of the Cúchulainn tales in English or Irish, and fictions like Randy Lee Eickhoff's [End Page 86] The Raid (1997), and even the wall murals in Derry and Belfast. Certainly, the popularity and ubiquity of the Dolmen Tain as a paperback helped to create a readership for such other works of translation as Kinsella and Ó Tuama's An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed (1981) or Gregory Schirmer's recent The Midnight Court: Eleven Versions of Merriman (2015). Had The Tain not been published at that historical moment—and not by Miller's Dolmen Press, and not with le Brocquy's "brush drawings"—the epic's status may well have remained entirely a local, narrowly Irish matter. Kinsella, Miller, and le Brocquy worked most concertedly on The Tain from 1965 through 1970—from the Yeats Centenary and the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising through the advent of the Northern Troubles. On a broader scale, The Tain came into being in years when images of confrontation pervaded the world media—the Cultural Revolution in China, the Soviet suppression of the "Prague Spring," and student demonstrations in Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, and Chicago. Ireland made its own headlines in Dungannon, Derry, and Belfast as civil rights demonstrations gave rise to policing by the British Army and resistance in the North. Even the sleepy South had its share of ructions, for example, the three-year student occupation of Dublin's National College of Art and Design.2 In the United States, the marches and killings in the South and urban rioting in the North through the antiwar demonstrations of 1968 to campus unrest after the 1970 shootings at Kent State dominated both politics and the media. In 1970, when writing Miller regarding corrections to the first Oxford printing of The Tain, Kinsella described Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, as "a riot-torn, foreclosed University community," with the town "under the equivalent of martial law, with a curfew . . . and tear gas on a hair trigger." Kinsella closed his letter to Miller with a petition, "That some day we may have a floor under...

Book Review: How Student Journalists Report Campus Unrest by Kaylene Dial Armstrong

Book Review: <i>How Student Journalists Report Campus Unrest</i> by Kaylene Dial Armstrong

Higher Learning, Social Churning: Midwestern Universities in the 1960s

Higher Learning, Social Churning Midwestern Universities in the 1960s Matthew Pehl Matthew Levin, Cold War University: Madison and the New Left in the Sixties. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. 234 pp. $26.95. Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 304 pp. $31.50. Sarah Eppler Janda, Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. 218 pp. $29.95. Mary Ann Wynkoop, Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, secondedition, 2017. 214 pp. $14.95. Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015. 232 pp. $22.50. William J. Shkurti, The Ohio State University in the Sixties: The Unraveling of the Old Order. Columbus, OH: Trillium, 2016. 390 pp. $25.95. Higher education is in trouble. A recent cover of Newsweekproclaims an ongoing "war on college." Conservatives and libertarians denounce the elitism and moral superiority they discern in liberal students and faculty, while liberals complain about the misplaced priorities of college sports and out-of-control fraternities. Controversial speakers face harassment and intimidation on campuses that are supposed bastions of free speech. Jeremiads [End Page 125]like William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep, and Richard Arum and Jospia Roska's Academically Adrift, condemn the intellectual hollowness of the modern curriculum. And everybodystands aghast at the ballooning tuition price tag (even as most voters acquiesce while our state legislatures continue to defund public education). As with much else in our culturally fraught and politically polarized moment, the roots of contemporary campus wars grow from the intellectually fecund soil of the 1960s. In the popular imagination, student insurgencies of the 1960s were predominately coastal affairs: Mario Savio orating for the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, or Mark Rudd leading the student occupation at Columbia. 1However, as a spate of recent studies on midwestern universities convincingly demonstrate, campus unrest was a national phenomenon—and midwestern schools were every bit as combustible as the usual coastal suspects. A moment's reflection confirms how unsurprising this conclusion should be; after all, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most important agent of the "New Left," wrote its famous 1962 manifesto in Michigan (conversely, Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative counterweight to SDS, was founded at Yale by William F. Buckley). Regionalism, in fact, probably plays a minor role in the story of student activism; as Beth Bailey observes in her study of the sexual revolution at the University of Kansas (KU), most college youth "understood their actions within a national framework" (6). If anything, midwesterners earned a reputation as the wild kids of the movement. Sarah Eppler Janda, author of a new study of the student counterculture in Oklahoma, points out that SDS leader Carl Davidson coined "prairie power" to "distinguish between the more straight-laced East Coast activists and those in middle America who embraced many forms of experimentation." Jeff Shero Nightbyrd, another SDS member, added, "Midwestern culture experimented with acid, pot, and stuff, and looked in part to the tradition of not only the IWW and the Populists, but to the American Indian who had ideas about the land and the interconnection of all living things" (7). When SDS leaders in Norman were arrested in 1966 as part of a major marijuana bust, embarrassed leaders on the coast wanted the Oklahoma chapter expelled; fellow prairie-power campuses like Texas, Kansas, and Missouri defended Norman and its more freewheeling culture (29–31). No wonder: Lawrence, home of KU, was "one of the most drug-oriented towns in the United States," Bailey tells us (166–67). Still, a less breathless understanding of midwestern campus upheaval in [End Page 126]the 1960s reminds us that student activists were minorities—albeit highly articulate and influential ones—within institutions, towns, and regions deeply marked by traditionalism and suspicious of troublemakers. College towns were always somewhat incongruous places, simultaneously implicated in the provincialism of local cultures and the cosmopolitanism of intellectual cultures. This was the paradox that Paul Engle, founding director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, balanced while he tirelessly pitched...

Philip Roth, Trick E. Dixon, and Curt Flood: Baseball as Satire in the Tradition of Jonathan Swift

Philip Roth, Trick E. Dixon, and Curt FloodBaseball as Satire in the Tradition of Jonathan Swift Ron Briley (bio) Prolific novelist Philip Roth, who died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at age eighty-five, was a celebrated chronicler of the American experience during the twentieth century. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature eluded Roth, his work was honored with two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Man Booker International Prize.1 Nonetheless, Roth's writing also elicited considerable criticism, and the Jewish writer was accused of promoting anti-Semitism as well as exhibiting misogyny in his depiction of women. Often incorporating autobiographical elements into his fiction, Roth explored themes of Jewish identity, sexuality, literature, growing up in Newark, New Jersey, and, yes, even his favorite sport of baseball. Roth seemingly brought these themes together when his Jewish protagonist Alexander Portnoy in the controversial Portnoy's Complaint (1969) relates to his psychiatrist a youthful experience about masturbating into his baseball mitt while fantasizing upon an attractive young Gentile woman ("a shiksa") during a nocturnal Newark bus ride. Alexander Portnoy, however, does employ his baseball glove for other purposes, and he waxes poetically about the beauty of playing center field where one is finally able to break free from the clutches of one's family background and baggage—"Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder, and nothing more."2 Indeed, homages and references to baseball show up in much of Roth's work, and with The Great American Novel (1973), he even devoted an entire book to the subject, using the national pastime to interrogate post-World War II America and the Red Scare in a humorous but insightful satire.3 When he was asked why he selected baseball as a metaphor to explore American literature and history, Roth in a tribute to Herman Melville quipped, "Whaling has already been used."4 Roth, however, was much more enamored with baseball than this bit of dismissive humor might indicate, and his understanding [End Page 142] of the role played by baseball in American culture is well exhibited in the oft ignored satirical Our Gang (1971), which followed the blockbuster Portnoy's Complaint.5 Written in the satirical style of Jonathan Swift, Our Gang concentrates upon the presidency and character of President Richard Nixon, but Roth's clever introduction of baseball's Curt Flood into the narrative indicates his grasp of how American culture and significant institutions within the culture were changing amid the stresses and strains of the turbulent 1960s. Before examining the satirical Our Gang in greater detail, it is worth expanding a bit on the relationship between Roth and baseball. In a piece for the New Yorker following Roth's death, Kathy Woldman discussed the author's vision of baseball, concluding that for Roth, "The sport embodied the country's unattained ideals."6 Thus, Woldman argued that Swede Levov, the main character of Roth's American Pastoral (1997), was a gifted high school baseball player who symbolized the assimilationist dreams of Newark's Jewish community. Life, however, is complicated, and Levov's vision of a pure and pastoral America was destroyed during the havoc of the 1960s. The Vietnam War, political assassinations, and urban and campus unrest demonstrated the fragility of the American dream when confronted with the realities of life in the post-World War II United States. Even institutions such as Major League Baseball (MLB) exhibited the corruption of the American ideal and became the target of Roth's satire.7 In an essay written for the New York Times on the eve of the 1973 MLB season, Roth emphasized the important role played by baseball in his youth. He grew up watching the Newark Bears play the New Jersey Giants, listening to the games of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio, and reading the baseball adventure stories of John Tunis. Roth wrote that during his college years a love affair with literature came to somewhat replace his infatuation with baseball. Roth, nevertheless, insisted, "Baseball with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal association, its native authenticity, its...

Lawrence Gostin: legal activist in the cause of global health

Lawrence Gostin: legal activist in the cause of global health

Leadership in Richard Wilbur's ‘For the Student Strikers’

In 1970, at the height of American campus unrest over the war in Vietnam and domestic turmoil, the poet Richard Wilbur was asked by students at Wesleyan University to write a poem supporting their strike. The poem Wilbur wrote, ‘For the Student Strikers,’ displeased the students: not surprisingly, for it is less a paean to youthful zeal and idealism than a gentle rebuke or correction. Wilbur urges the striking students to listen to others' voices, and to recognize the humanity even in their most visible and intimate opponents, sheriffs and guardsmen. Wilbur's insistence on empathy is an enduring lesson for those who presume to lead and champion social and political change.

Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker by Carolyn J. Brown

643 Book Review achieve universal meaning” (xiii), and Rivera’s novel certainly fits this bill. Rough South, Rural South enriches our study of Rough South fiction both by surveying the genre’s history and by prodding us to envision new possibilities for its future. University of Alabama Jolene Hubbs Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker, by Carolyn J. Brown, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. 144 pp. $20.00 cloth. MARGARET WALKER, A LONG-TIME RESIDENT OF JACKSON AND PROFESSOR of English at Jackson State College (now University), is the subject of Carolyn J. Brown’s biography, published in 2014. Having recently completed a biography of fellow Jackson resident Eudora Welty, Brown discloses in her “Author’s Note” that she discovered Walker through casual reading concerning Mississippi writers. It is in this mode that Brown continued her exploration of Walker’s life through her writing, friendships, and professional accomplishments. This book fills a particular niche in the area of academic research because it is written as an introduction to a writer rather than as a critical assessment of that writer’s merits. Readership is addressed explicitly when Brown writes that her biography is “targeting middle-school and high-school-age students as well as the general reader” (xii). The book certainly fulfills its promise to promote a worthy author, as Brown states that she “hope[s] that I have done her story justice. . . . [and] introduce[d] her to a new generation of readers” (xiii). Arranged chronologically, the ten short chapters chronicle Walker’s journey through life by relying heavily on an unpublished manuscript of Walker’s. autobiography and the repository of her papers housed in the Center that bears her name at Jackson State. Each chapter is liberally sprinkled with photographs, some of which seem to be stock images while others are clearly intimate snapshots from Walker’s own collection. Scholar Maryemma Graham, University of Kansas, provided amplematerialaswell,and is generously (and appropriately) thankedfor doingso.Graham’sbiographyonWalkerisforthcomingandwillcontain more critical discussion of Walker’s life and work. 644 Mississippi Quarterly Appendices devoted to Walker’s life, major published works, major honors and awards, and the general milieu of her accomplishments provide useful reference guides. Frequent quotations from Walker’s poetry, prose, and manuscripts also round out the depiction of Walker’s major insights and the influences on her writing. Perhaps for the uninformed reader, a brief summary of her novel, Jubilee, and major poetry editions would have been helpful. This biography just touches on the events surrounding Walker’s life—enough that the reader will want to more fully explore her writings.Walker’saccomplishmentsareindeedastounding.Forexample, she attended The University of Iowa’s MFA program in its earliest stages, returning to complete her doctorate years later and to finish her dissertation, which would eventually be her most famous work, Jubilee. Her civil rights work began in the late 1960s; when two student protestors were killed by police at Jackson State in 1970, Walker was called to testify before the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. She would go on to become a leading Democratic voice in state and national politics. Walker also established one of the country’s first African American studies programs at Jackson State at her Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, which twenty-one years later would be renamed in her honor. Finally, Walker’s commitment to African American women’s writing, through the groundbreaking conference on Phillis Wheatley’s life and legacy in 1973, is in and of itself a legacy worth exploring. Walker’s own poetry commemorates this event, which a who’s who of African American women writers attended. Quoting Nikki Giovanni, Brown successfully fulfills the mission that she setouttoaccomplishbypublicizing “the most famous person nobody knows” (xi) through this biography. Let’s hope that it whets the appetite to read, not just Jubilee and Walker’s poetry, but the myriad of African American writers, particularly African American women writers, who are also part of her “Song.” Mississippi University for Women Amy Pardo ...

The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions

What explains the rise of race-conscious affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions? The dominant theory posits that adoption of such policies was precipitated by urban and campus unrest in the North during the late 1960s. Based on primary research in a sample of 17 selective schools, we find limited support for the dominant theory. Affirmative action arose in two distinct waves during the 1960s. A first wave was launched in the early 1960s by northern college administrators inspired by nonviolent civil rights protests in the South. A second wave of affirmative action emerged in the late 1960s, primarily as a response to campus-based student protests. Most late-adopting schools were those most favored by the Protestant upper class. Our findings are most consistent with a theoretical perspective on institutional change in which social movements’ effects are mediated by the moral and ideological beliefs of key administrators.

The effect of campus unrest on the language proficiency of university students

This report on the extent to which students' English suffers during student unrest is based on responses by a group of black South African students registered for Practical English to a questionnaire administered in the Language Laboratory at a predominantly black university. The rationale behind the questionnaire will be outlined first before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the results. Hierdie verslag oor die mate waarin studente se Engels gedurende studente-onrus agteruit gegaan het, is gegrond op 'n groep Swart Suid-Afrikaanse studente, ingeskryf vir Praktiese Engels, se antwoorde op 'n vraelys. Die vraelys is deur die taallaboratorium van 'n oorwegend Swart universiteit hanteer. Die doe! van die vraelys word eers verduidelik. Daarop volg dan 'n uitvoerige ontleding van die uitslae.